Play With ASL x CLERC: Building the Future of Sign Language Through Play

CLERC is partnering with Play With ASL, the Deaf-owned ASL gaming company, to turn sign language data contribution into a game built with the Deaf community. Starting this week, ASL signers in the United States and Canada can contribute to the CLERC sign language corpus through short signing challenges, linked directly from Play With ASL.

For us, this answers a question every sign language AI project eventually runs into: how do you collect data from thousands of signers without turning their language into a chore?

What is Play With ASL?

Play With ASL is a Deaf-owned company founded by Jon Mowl. It teaches American Sign Language through games and interactive experiences.

• A global community. More than 75,000 iOS downloads across 90+ countries.
• Learning through play. Progression, challenges and rewards make people want to come back and sign.
• Growing into classrooms. The platform is expanding into schools and universities.

From the Deaflympics to a partnership

Jon and I met at the Deaflympics in Tokyo. We talked about entrepreneurship, games, education, and how our projects could one day work together. Less than a year later, that conversation is a partnership between our two companies.

We are both Deaf founders building around sign language, from two different sides. Play With ASL knows how to make people want to sign. CLERC builds the data that sign language AI is trained and evaluated on. Better models need better data, and better data needs people who actually want to take part.

"When Florian and I met in Tokyo, we were two Deaf entrepreneurs dreaming about what could be possible. Now we're bringing our strengths together to do something meaningful. I believe the future of sign language technology should be shaped by the very people who use it. And what better way to get our community involved than through play?"

Jon Mowl, founder of Play With ASL

Contribution that feels like play

The hardest part of sign language AI is not the model. It is collecting enough diverse, high-quality data to cover how people actually sign. Signing varies across people, regions, generations and backgrounds, and a model only learns the variation it has seen.

Traditional data collection gets repetitive fast. So we built a contribution game on the CLERC webcam platform, and Play With ASL brings the players.

• Short signing challenges. A few minutes, from any webcam, no setup.
• Progression built in. Leaderboards, badges and head-to-head challenges are next, and the top contributors will be rewarded.
• Open to the US and Canada. Any ASL signer can join from day one.

Diversity matters as much as volume. Every new signer brings the corpus closer to ASL as the community actually signs it.

The groundwork for tomorrow's ASL learning

Each company does what it does best. Play With ASL owns the game experience, the learning and its community. CLERC runs collection, annotation and quality control, and licenses data to AI labs, tech companies and research teams.

Together, this lays the groundwork for the educational use cases of tomorrow. Play With ASL will use CLERC data to build them into its games. We have more ideas than we can share today, and we will reveal them when they are ready.

Built with the Deaf community

Too often, sign language technology is built first and shown to Deaf people afterward. We think the community belongs in the process from the start, as contributors to the data, not only as users of the final product.

Games make that possible at scale. More participation means more diverse data. Better data means better AI. Better AI means new tools for signers and learners, and the value flows back to the community that created it.

"Jon and I started as two Deaf entrepreneurs talking about what could be possible. Today it is a real partnership between two companies with complementary strengths. Sign language technology should not just be built for the Deaf community. It should be built with it, and a game is one of the most natural ways to make that happen."

Florian Méloux, founder and CEO of CLERC

Try it yourself

This is only the beginning. We will keep building, testing and sharing what we learn along the way.

Play now. If you sign ASL and live in the US or Canada, start your first challenge at huddle.playwithasl.com, or find it on Play With ASL.

If you are building sign language AI and need data you are allowed to train on, get in touch with CLERC.

Follow CLERC to see where this goes.