Chrome Extension v0.4.1 - The 3D avatar actually signs now

If you use the 3D avatar, update. If you only use the 2D skeleton, nothing here
changes for you: the 2D renderer was always correct and is untouched.

The 3D avatar was placing hands in the wrong place

Its hands sat near the hips and barely moved, whatever the sign was. Three
separate faults in the 3D path, none of them in the sign data itself:

• The forearm was positioned against the wrong reference, inheriting a rotation
  from the upper arm that had already been applied. Isolated on the rig, the
  upper arm was exact while the forearm came out 72 degrees off whenever the
  arm moved. The forearm carries the hand, so that alone decided where every
  hand went.
• Arms were aimed rather than solved. Pointing a bone along a captured direction
  takes the limb LENGTH from the avatar, so the hand could only reach as far as
  the avatar's own arm allowed, which is shorter than the captured one. The
  wrist is now solved to its target position, with the captured elbow deciding
  which way the arm bends.
• Two different definitions of where the torso ends were being mixed, which left
  every hand slightly high.

Measured against the 2D renderer over 818,904 solves from 500 signs, since 2D
plots the captured points directly and is the picture that was already right.
Median error dropped from 0.434 to 0.003 of torso length, and the worst tenth
from 0.737 to 0.010. Just as important, the hand now travels the same range as
the reference instead of sitting in a narrow band at hip height.

Fingerspelling improved as a side effect. The same fault compounded down each
finger, curling them; fingers now extend to 0.83 of their natural span rather
than 0.66.

The female avatar had never moved

Not in this release or any before it. Her rig names its bones with a different
prefix to the male one, and the code assumed a single prefix for both. Nothing
failed loudly: she loaded, reported herself ready, and stood still through every
sign. The prefix is now read from the avatar. Both now animate.

Unchanged

The 192 bundled signs are byte for byte identical to v0.4.0. Only the manifest
and the 3D renderer differ.

Install

Download signlytic-extension.zip, unzip, open chrome://extensions, enable
Developer Mode, and Load Unpacked on the unzipped folder. If v0.4.0 is already
loaded, remove it first.

Attribution

Signlytic AI, by Oke Iyanuoluwa Enoch. If you use, fork or build on this project,
please credit the project and link back to this repository.

Chrome Extension v0.4.0 (superseded by v0.4.1)

A cosmetic release. Nothing about how the extension works has changed, and if
v0.3.9 is working for you there is no need to update.

What changed

The extension called itself "Signlytic AI - BSL Overlay" using an em-dash. It is
now a plain hyphen, in the toolbar name and in the tooltip. The character was
stored escaped in the manifest, which is why it outlived several passes meant to
remove it.

Six status messages lost the same character and read a little more plainly as a
result: "mic active, speak now" rather than "mic active - speak now", and the
same for the paused, manual, and avatar-load messages.

What did not change

The signing itself, the caption detection, the gloss conversion, the renderers,
and the 192 bundled signs are all byte-for-byte identical to v0.3.9. The package
was diffed against the previous release to confirm that: same 209 files, and the
only ones that differ are the manifest and the four scripts carrying those
strings.

Install

Download signlytic-extension.zip, unzip it, open chrome://extensions, enable
Developer Mode, and use Load Unpacked on the unzipped folder. Manual install,
because this is not on the Chrome Web Store yet.

If you already have v0.3.9 loaded, remove it first, or Chrome will keep the old
name.

Attribution

Signlytic AI, by Oke Iyanuoluwa Enoch. If you use, fork or build on this project,
please credit the project and link back to this repository.

Desktop App v0.3.8 - Windows. The 3D avatar actually signs now

Windows only for the moment. The macOS build stays at 0.3.7 until it can be
rebuilt on a Mac, so the Mac download on the website still points there and does
not yet include the fix below. If you are on a Mac and using the 3D avatar, wait
for 0.3.8.

The 3D avatar was placing hands in the wrong place

Its hands sat near the hips and barely moved, whatever the sign was. Three
separate faults in the 3D renderer, none of them in the sign data:

• The forearm was positioned against the wrong reference, inheriting a rotation
  from the upper arm that had already been applied. Isolated on the rig, the
  upper arm was exact while the forearm came out 72 degrees off whenever the arm
  moved. The forearm carries the hand, so that alone decided where every hand
  went.
• Arms were aimed rather than solved. Pointing a bone along a captured direction
  takes the limb LENGTH from the avatar, so the hand could only reach as far as
  the avatar's own arm allowed, which is shorter than the captured one. The
  wrist is now solved to its target position, with the captured elbow deciding
  which way the arm bends.
• Two different definitions of where the torso ends were being mixed, leaving
  every hand slightly high.

Measured against the 2D renderer over 818,904 solves from 500 signs, since 2D
plots the captured points directly and is the picture that was already right.
Median error fell from 0.434 to 0.003 of torso length, and the worst tenth from
0.737 to 0.010. The hand now travels the same range as the reference rather than
sitting in a narrow band at hip height.

Fingerspelling improved with it. The same fault compounded down each finger,
curling them; fingers now reach 0.83 of their natural span rather than 0.66.

The female avatar had never moved

Not in this release or any before it. Her rig names its bones with a different
prefix to the male one and the code assumed a single prefix for both. Nothing
failed loudly: she loaded, reported herself ready, and stood still through every
sign. The prefix is now read from the avatar. Both animate.

Everything else is unchanged

Captions, sentence assembly, the 2D renderer, the settings panel and signing
speed are all as they were in 0.3.7. The 2D renderer was always correct and is
untouched.

Install

Download Signlytic AI Setup 0.3.8.exe and run it. SmartScreen will warn that
the publisher is unknown, because the build is not code-signed: choose
More info, then Run anyway.

Live Captions needs Windows 11 22H2 or newer.

Attribution

Signlytic AI, by Oke Iyanuoluwa Enoch. If you use, fork or build on this project,
please credit the project and link back to this repository.

Chrome Extension v0.3.9 (superseded by v0.4.0)

Chrome extension, beta. Real-time British Sign Language overlay for any page.

What changed in 0.3.9

The 3D avatar is about ten times smaller. The models were 35 MB and 53 MB of
uncompressed textures; they are now 3.5 MB and 5.4 MB. The 3D signer appears in
roughly half the time, and on a slow connection the difference is far larger.

Nothing about the signing changed. Only the textures were re-encoded, so the
skeleton, the skinning and the poses are byte-for-byte the same rig.

This release exists mainly to reach you at all: the model is cached in your
browser with a one-year lifetime, so without a new version marker anyone who had
already loaded the old one would have kept it. Updating replaces it and reclaims
the space the old copy was using.

Install

1. Download signlytic-extension.zip below and unzip it.
2. Open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode (top right).
3. Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.

If you already have it installed, remove the old one first, or use Reload.

Avatar assets

The 3D character rig is built on third-party assets licensed for use in this
project but not for redistribution. They are not attached to releases and
not in the source tree; the extension fetches the model at runtime. The 2D
skeleton renderer needs no model and works offline.

Attribution

Signlytic AI, by Oke Iyanuoluwa Enoch. If you use, fork or build on this
project, please keep the copyright notice and credit the project.

Desktop App v0.3.7 (superseded by v0.3.8)

Superseded by v0.3.8 on Windows.
There is no macOS build of 0.3.8 yet, because it has to be produced on a Mac,
so the macOS download on this page is still the current one. It does not
carry 0.3.8's fixes to the 3D avatar. Its 2D renderer is unaffected and is the
accurate one to use on a Mac for now.

A floating BSL signer that reads what your computer is saying, so anything it
plays can be signed, not just what is in a browser. Beta on both platforms.

Install on Windows

Download Signlytic AI Setup 0.3.7.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen
will warn that the publisher is unknown, because the build is not code-signed
yet: choose More info, then Run anyway.

Install on macOS

Download Signlytic AI-0.3.7-universal.dmg below. One file covers both Apple
silicon and Intel, which is why it is larger than the Windows installer.
macOS 13 or newer.

The build is neither signed nor notarised, and macOS is stricter about that than
Windows is. Opening it normally will fail. Instead, drag the app to Applications,
then right-click it and choose Open, and confirm once. After that it launches
normally.

The Mac app asks for permission the first time you press Start Captions:
microphone, speech recognition, and screen recording if you pick system audio.
Screen recording is how macOS gates capturing what other apps are playing.

macOS is newer and less tested than Windows

The Windows app has been through several releases. The Mac one is on its first,
so expect rougher edges. Microphone is the default and is the best tested path.

The Live Captions option under "Listen to" is experimental. Its ability to
read the Live Captions window was proven with a standalone probe, but it was
never seen delivering a sentence end to end inside the packaged app, because the
Accessibility permission it needs was never granted before that work stopped. If
it does nothing for you, that is the known gap: use microphone or system audio
instead. The source is kept on the macos-live-captions-unverified branch of the
main repository, with the remaining check written down.

What changed in 0.3.7

macOS support. Instead of reading system captions the way the Windows build
does, the Mac helper recognises speech directly, from the microphone or from
system audio, and feeds the same sentence assembler. Windows is unchanged by
this work and was re-verified after it.

The 3D avatar is about ten times smaller, 35 MB down to 3.5 MB for the male
model and 53 MB down to 5.4 MB for the female one. It appears in roughly half
the time, and far faster than that on a slow connection.

Only the textures were re-encoded. The skeleton, skinning and poses are the same
rig, so the signing itself is unchanged.

The app caches the model on disk, so this release also carries a version marker
that replaces the old copy rather than leaving it stranded.

Earlier releases

• 0.3.6 settings panel behind a gear, and microphone audio made optional
• 0.3.5 switches on "Include microphone audio" in Live Captions for you
• 0.3.4 signing speed: 1x through 2x, remembered between runs
• 0.3.3 fixed Live Captions in the installed build

Using Live Captions on Windows

Press Start Live Captions. The app starts Windows Live Captions for you if it
is not already running. On a machine that has never used it, Windows asks you to
accept a notice and download a speech model once; complete that and press again.

Live Captions needs Windows 11 22H2 or newer.

Attribution

Signlytic AI, by Oke Iyanuoluwa Enoch. If you use, fork or build on this project,
please credit the project and link back to this repository.

Chrome Extension v0.3.8 (superseded by v0.3.9)

Chrome extension, beta. Real-time British Sign Language overlay for any page.

If you are already on v0.3.7, you do not need to update

This is a housekeeping release. Comparing this build against v0.3.7 file by
file, 208 of the 209 files are byte-identical. The one change is a metadata
file that nothing reads at runtime, so the extension behaves exactly as v0.3.7
did. Updating is harmless, but it will not change anything you can see.

Install

1. Download signlytic-extension.zip below and unzip it.
2. Open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode (top right).
3. Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.

What changed in 0.3.8

data/signs/index.json carried metadata that was wrong in every field. It
claimed zero bundled signs against 192 real ones, and its cdnBase pointed at
a raw GitHub path that is not published and returned 404. Nothing reads the
file, so this was a misleading signpost rather than a fault, but it now
reports the real figures and the endpoint the overlay actually uses.

Confirmed in this release, unchanged since 0.3.7

The microphone restart limiter was exercised against a real abort storm in a
browser, rather than only reasoned about. On repeated aborts it backs off at
500, 1000, 1500 and 2000 ms, stops after five attempts, reports "Speech
recognition keeps aborting", and leaves no pending timer behind. A successful
result clears the counter, so a burst of transient aborts does not disable the
microphone for the rest of the session. Denied microphone permission is
reported once and never retried.

The 3D avatar is fetched through the Signlytic website at runtime rather than
from a file attached to a release.

Avatar assets

The 3D character rig is built on third-party assets licensed for use in this
project but not for redistribution. They are not attached to releases and
not in the source tree. The 2D skeleton renderer needs no model and works
offline.

Attribution

Signlytic AI, by Oke Iyanuoluwa Enoch. If you use, fork or build on this
project, please keep the copyright notice and credit the project.

Chrome Extension v0.3.7 (superseded by v0.3.8)

Chrome extension, beta. Real-time British Sign Language overlay for any page.

Install

1. Download signlytic-extension.zip below and unzip it.
2. Open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode (top right).
3. Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.

What changed in 0.3.7

• The 3D avatar model is now loaded through the Signlytic website rather than
  from a file attached to this release. Nothing to download and nothing to
  configure: the extension fetches it on demand the first time you switch to 3D.
• The .glb avatar files are no longer distributed as release assets. See
  "Avatar assets" below.

Avatar assets

The 3D character rig is built on third-party assets that are licensed for use
in this project but not for redistribution. They are therefore not attached
to releases and are not included in the source tree. The extension streams the
model at runtime instead.

The 2D skeleton renderer needs no external model and works offline.

Attribution

Signlytic AI, by Oke Iyanuoluwa E. If you use, fork or build on this project,
please credit the project and link back to this repository.

Desktop App v0.3.6 (superseded by v0.3.7)

Windows desktop app, beta. A floating BSL signer that reads Windows Live
Captions, so anything your PC plays can be signed, not just what is in a browser.

Install

Download Signlytic AI Setup 0.3.6.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen
will warn that the publisher is unknown, because the build is not code-signed
yet: choose More info, then Run anyway.

New in 0.3.6

A settings panel. The title bar used to carry a 2D/3D switch and five
position buttons alongside the title and window controls, which left it cramped
and hard to read once the window was snapped to a corner. Those controls now sit
behind a gear, and the title bar carries the title and the window buttons only.
The panel floats over the signer, so opening it never resizes anything.

Microphone audio is now optional. It is still switched on for you by
default, but you can turn it off in the settings panel, in which case the app
leaves the Live Captions option exactly as it finds it.

Worth knowing what the option does: it adds your own microphone as a caption
source, so your side of a conversation is captioned and signed too, not only
the audio coming out of your PC. It may or may not make a difference for a
given app, which is why it is now yours to choose.

New in 0.3.5

Live Captions forgets "Include microphone audio" every time it starts, so it had
to be switched on by hand under Settings, Preferences on every run. The app does
it for you.

New in 0.3.4

Signing speed: 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x and 2x, next to the playback controls.
Your choice is remembered between runs, and changing it mid-sentence takes
effect straight away.

Fixed in 0.3.3

• Live Captions works in the installed app. The caption reader was packed
  inside app.asar, a virtual archive PowerShell cannot open, so it died the
  moment it started with code 4294770688. It now ships as a real file.
• Switching 3D back to 2D hides the 3D avatar, instead of leaving it painted
  on top.

Using Live Captions

Press Start Live Captions. The app will start Windows Live Captions for you
if it is not already running. On a machine that has never used it before,
Windows asks you to accept a notice and download a speech model once; complete
that and press the button again.

Live Captions needs Windows 11 22H2 or newer.

Window

Frameless and translucent, always on top. Drag the title strip to move it. Under
the gear, the position buttons snap it to a screen corner and Float frees it
again.

macOS

Not yet. The rest of the app is platform-neutral, but reading system captions on
macOS uses a different API and needs a signed helper, so it is a separate piece
of work. Manual text entry will work there when it ships.

Avatar assets

The 3D character rig is built on third-party assets that are licensed for use in
this project but not for redistribution, so they are not attached to
releases and not included in the source tree. The app streams the model at
runtime. The 2D renderer needs no model.

Attribution

Signlytic AI, by Oke Iyanuoluwa E. If you use, fork or build on this project,
please credit the project and link back to this repository.

Desktop App v0.3.5 (superseded by v0.3.6)

Windows desktop app, beta. A floating BSL signer that reads Windows Live
Captions, so anything your PC plays can be signed, not just what is in a browser.

Install

Download Signlytic AI Setup 0.3.5.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen
will warn that the publisher is unknown, because the build is not code-signed
yet: choose More info, then Run anyway.

New in 0.3.5

Microphone audio is switched on for you. Live Captions resets its "Include
microphone audio" option to off every time it starts, so it had to be found and
switched on by hand under Settings, Preferences on every run. Pressing Start
Live Captions now does it for you.

Worth knowing what this option does: it adds your own microphone as a caption
source. Your side of a conversation gets captioned and signed too, not only the
audio coming out of your PC. If you would rather it stayed off, switch it back
off in Live Captions after starting, or say so and it can be made optional.

If a future Windows update moves that menu, the app says so in its status line
and captions carry on working as before.

New in 0.3.4

Signing speed: 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x and 2x, next to the playback controls.
Your choice is remembered between runs, and changing it mid-sentence takes
effect straight away.

Fixed in 0.3.3

• Live Captions works in the installed app. The caption reader was packed
  inside app.asar, a virtual archive PowerShell cannot open, so it died the
  moment it started with code 4294770688. It now ships as a real file.
• Switching 3D back to 2D hides the 3D avatar, instead of leaving it painted
  on top.

Using Live Captions

Press Start Live Captions. The app will start Windows Live Captions for you
if it is not already running. On a machine that has never used it before,
Windows asks you to accept a notice and download a speech model once; complete
that and press the button again.

Live Captions needs Windows 11 22H2 or newer.

Window

Frameless and translucent, always on top. Drag the title strip to move it. The
position buttons snap it to a screen corner, and Float frees it again.

macOS

Not yet. The rest of the app is platform-neutral, but reading system captions on
macOS uses a different API and needs a signed helper, so it is a separate piece
of work. Manual text entry will work there when it ships.

Avatar assets

The 3D character rig is built on third-party assets that are licensed for use in
this project but not for redistribution, so they are not attached to
releases and not included in the source tree. The app streams the model at
runtime. The 2D renderer needs no model.

Attribution

Signlytic AI, by Oke Iyanuoluwa E. If you use, fork or build on this project,
please credit the project and link back to this repository.

Desktop App v0.3.4 (superseded by v0.3.5)

Windows desktop app, beta. A floating BSL signer that reads Windows Live
Captions, so anything your PC plays can be signed, not just what is in a browser.

Install

Download Signlytic AI Setup 0.3.4.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen
will warn that the publisher is unknown, because the build is not code-signed
yet: choose More info, then Run anyway.

New in 0.3.4

Signing speed. A speed selector sits with the playback controls, offering
1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x and 2x. Your choice is remembered between runs, and
changing it mid-sentence takes effect straight away rather than waiting for the
next sentence.

Faster settings are useful once you are used to reading the signing, and for
keeping up with quick speech. 1x remains the default.

Also in 0.3.3

• Live Captions works in the installed app. The caption reader was being
  packed inside app.asar, a virtual archive PowerShell cannot open, so it died
  the moment it started with code 4294770688. It now ships as a real file.
• Switching 3D back to 2D hides the 3D avatar, instead of leaving it painted
  on top.
• The 3D model is fetched through the Signlytic website rather than from a file
  attached to a release.

Using Live Captions

Press Start Live Captions. The app will start Windows Live Captions for you
if it is not already running. On a machine that has never used it before,
Windows asks you to accept a notice and download a speech model once; complete
that and press the button again.

Live Captions needs Windows 11 22H2 or newer.

Window

Frameless and translucent, always on top. Drag the title strip to move it. The
position buttons snap it to a screen corner, and Float frees it again.

macOS

Not yet. The rest of the app is platform-neutral, but reading system captions on
macOS uses a different API and needs a signed helper, so it is a separate piece
of work. Manual text entry will work there when it ships.

Avatar assets

The 3D character rig is built on third-party assets that are licensed for use in
this project but not for redistribution, so they are not attached to
releases and not included in the source tree. The app streams the model at
runtime. The 2D renderer needs no model.

Attribution

Signlytic AI, by Oke Iyanuoluwa E. If you use, fork or build on this project,
please credit the project and link back to this repository.