Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 4 November 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence and Disability: Discussion (Resumed)

2:00 am

Mr. John Sherwin:

I will add that the World Federation of the Deaf, of which we are a member, is supportive of using AI and avatars at the moment for children's programmes and repetitive public messaging like signage or that type of thing. For full conversations it is not adequate and is not communicating to deaf people. The technology may get there in the future but, for example, there is still no significant corpus of ISL signing in this country for AI to learn from. We are a bit away from that at the moment.