Terp 360 — Signvrse's AI Sign-Language Avatar for Kenya's Deaf Community

Kenya has an estimated 2.7 million Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, yet African countries have as few as 40-700 certified sign-language interpreters between them. Founded in Nairobi in 2023 by engineer Elly Savatia, Signvrse built Terp 360, which uses motion-captured Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) recordings layered with a generative-AI translation model to render spoken or typed English as a photorealistic 3D avatar signing in real time.

The training dataset -- more than 20,000 professionally captured sign sequences from signers in both urban and rural Kenya -- was built and validated in direct collaboration with Deaf community members, sign linguists and AI engineers; pre-computed sign combinations cut processing time by roughly 35%. Early prototypes built on basic Unity animation produced stiff, robotic motion that Deaf testers found hard to read, so the team rebuilt the animation pipeline for more natural, fluid signing.

As of its 2025 beta, the web-based platform had engaged more than 2,000 Deaf and hard-of-hearing users for testing across Kenya and Uganda, and the company opened a second office in Rwanda to pilot classroom and public-service deployments. Signvrse has been backed by $10,000 grants each from UNICEF and the We Are Family Foundation, and was one of 21 organisations selected for Google.org's 2024 Generative AI Accelerator.

Independent, peer-reviewed evaluation of translation accuracy has not yet been published, and Terp 360 remains one-directional (spoken/written language to sign, not sign to speech), so it does not yet replace two-way human interpretation.