Hearica

Kimberly Ross, Denis Yaremenko, Serge Punchev, Elvis Bueno, and Andrius Pamakstys all looked at the same problem: every app on your computer makes noise—YouTube, Spotify, Slack notifications, Zoom calls, Siri—and if you're deaf or hard of hearing, that audio might as well not exist. So they built Hearica, a tool that captures literally every sound your computer makes and turns it into real-time captions. Not just microphone input, not just live speech—system audio. All of it.

Existing accessibility tools basically do one of two things: they transcribe what someone is saying into a microphone, or they require special apps to support screen readers. Hearica goes under the hood and grabs audio at the OS level, so whatever is playing—music, videos, alerts, robotic text-to-speech—becomes readable text. There are 430 million deaf or hard-of-hearing people worldwide. That's 430 million people who have been basically excluded from half of what happens on a computer. This team of five is trying to change that with a simple premise: if your computer is making noise, you should be able to read it.