Hold a letter shape steady until it commits. J and Z need motion. New to signing? Start with the 📖 Learn tab — it teaches you the alphabet. The 🎓 Train tab teaches tulande your own signs (including Zambian Sign Language) — trained signs are recognised here automatically.
🎓 Teach tulande a sign
Your signs
Record 3–5 samples of each sign for best results. Everything stays on this device — export a pack to share your signs with friends.
📖 Learn the signs
Hold each handshape until the bar fills — tulande watches and only moves on when you get it right. Letters teaches the fingerspelling alphabet (used by Zambian Sign Language too); Words and Sentences drill you on spelling whole words and phrases. For custom whole-word signs, record them in the 🎓 Train tab, then use them in the 🖐 Sign tab.
📞 Free video call with sign captions
Up to 4 people. Video and messages travel directly between devices — the server only arranges the handshake. Deaf side: sign during the call from the 🖐 Sign tab and your text appears as live captions for everyone. Hearing side: tap 🎙 so your speech is captioned for everyone.
How tulande works
🖐 Sign tab — the camera reads your hand. Built in: the ASL fingerspelling alphabet (A–Z), numbers 1–5, with J and Z as moving signs. Letters that look identical (like U and 2) are shown together. Everything runs on your device — no internet needed, nothing is uploaded.
🎓 Train tab — teach tulande your own signs, including full Zambian Sign Language words. Name a sign, hold record, repeat 3–5 times. Trained signs are recognised automatically in the Sign tab and during calls. Export a sign pack file and share it so friends' apps learn the same signs.
📖 Learn tab — tulande teaches you the fingerspelling alphabet (A–Z, 1–5). It shows the target sign, watches your hand through the camera, and only moves on when you hold the shape correctly — so hearing family and friends can learn at their own pace. Your progress is saved on your device.
📞 Call tab — free video calls for up to 4 people. Sign during a call and your words appear as live captions on everyone's screen, and can be spoken aloud for hearing friends. Hearing friends tap 🎙 so their speech becomes captions for you. Chat is built in too.
One-time server setup (for calls)
Calls need a tiny free Cloudflare Worker that only exchanges connection handshakes. Full instructions ship with the app package (README in the deploy kit). After deploying it, paste its address into the "Signaling server" field on the Call tab — once per device.
Honest limits
Fingerspelling and trained signs work well; full continuous sentence translation is beyond today's technology for any sign language. tulande gets better the more you train it — and your training never leaves your device unless you share a pack. Some similar letters (M/N/S/T) are genuinely hard — the app shows its second guess, and you can train those letters yourself to make them yours.
Privacy
Camera processing, sign training and recognition are 100% on-device. Calls are peer-to-peer. The signaling worker stores only short-lived handshake records (auto-deleted in minutes). No accounts, no analytics, no tracking.
tulande v1.1 · hand tracking by MediaPipe (Apache-2.0) · made by Kangwa Mukonda