A small team
with one priority.
SoundSense exists to give deaf and hard of hearing people better sound awareness than the generic tools they have been offered. That is the entire mission. Everything else is scaffolding.
Built at RIT.
Shaped by NTID.
Rochester Institute of Technology is home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, one of the largest communities of deaf and hard of hearing students, faculty, and staff in the world. You cannot walk through this campus without it changing how you think about accessibility.
SoundSense is being built here because it could not be built anywhere else. Every design decision gets tested against real feedback from the people it is meant to serve, not focus groups, not personas, not a once-a-quarter advisory call.
We are students, researchers, and advocates, and we are building this in public.
A note from Aaron.
I am Aaron Guss, a grad student in the MIS program at RIT Saunders, with minors in Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship.
SoundSense started as a class project and kept going because the feedback was the same every time: the existing tools do not work well enough, and the community has been asked to put up with that for too long. The more I dug in, the clearer it got that this needed to be built properly, as a product, not as a demo.
I run a few ventures at once. This one is the one that matters the most to me, because the people who will use it need it to be right. I take that seriously.
SoundSense is dedicated to the memory of Jeff Gordon.
Three things
we refuse to compromise on.
Privacy is architecture.
We cannot send your audio to the cloud because the app cannot send your audio to the cloud. Not a policy. A design.
The community leads.
We build with deaf and hard of hearing users, not for them. If the people this is meant to serve do not like a decision, we do not make that decision.
Safety stays free.
Core sound awareness is free, and it will always be free. If safety can only work behind a paywall, we have already failed.