Chinese entrepreneur Cheng Lu (left) speaks with guests at Fast Company's 2026 World Changing Ideas Awards honoree reception in New York on Sept 16. His AI accessibility concept, EchoBridge, received an Honorable Mention in the social equity and accessibility category.
Chinese entrepreneur Cheng Lu is exploring whether multimodal artificial intelligence can bring benefits beyond productivity gains to people long underserved by technology.
Cheng, a former Google developer relations program manager and Hugging Face Fellow, has developed the AI accessibility concept EchoBridge to focus on communication barriers between people who use sign language and those who communicate through speech.
EchoBridge comes as AI applications are expanding rapidly. From coding assistants and content generation to customer service and data processing, many products have focused first on productivity. As models become better at handling text, audio, images and video together, some problems once difficult to address are being reconsidered.
According to this year's Government Work Report, China is expanding the "AI+" integration, and bolstering the commercial and large-scale application of AI in key industry sectors.
EchoBridge explores how AI, computer vision and multimodal technologies could support translation among sign language, speech and text, helping people who communicate differently understand one another.
The World Health Organization estimates that about 430 million people worldwide require rehabilitation for disabling hearing loss, a figure projected to surpass 700 million by 2050.
Cheng said unaddressed hearing loss carries an annual global cost of nearly $1 trillion. These figures do not represent sign language users, but show the broader scale of accessibility needs.
Fast Company, a United States business publication, held a reception in New York on Sept 16 for honorees of its 2026 World Changing Ideas Awards. With Cheng attending the event, his AI accessibility concept received an Honorable Mention in the social equity and accessibility category.
EchoBridge also reflected Cheng's earlier work in developer and open-source communities. During his three years as a developer relations program manager at Google, he launched Study Jams China, with two editions reaching nearly 4,000 participants. He later worked on enterprise adoption of Flutter in China, collaborating with more than 20 leading technology companies on developer ecosystem initiatives.
After leaving Google, Cheng became a Hugging Face Fellow and deepened his involvement in the open-source AI community. As a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, he also followed how research moves into practical applications.
"When I was working with developer communities at Google, I saw many developers start by learning a new technology and eventually turn it into a real product," Cheng said. "Later, through the open-source AI community, I became convinced that the value of a technology lies not just in what it can do, but in whether people can use it to solve real-world problems."
As multimodal AI advances, Cheng has begun to think more broadly about where the technology can be applied.
"A lot of AI products today are asking the same question: how can we help people do things faster and more efficiently?" he said. "I wanted to ask one more question — can these same capabilities also help people who have historically benefited less from technological progress?"
EchoBridge is one attempt to explore that question. Cheng chose communication barriers as a starting point, looking at how emerging capabilities in vision, language and multimodal AI might enable new forms of interaction.
He said technologies widely used to improve productivity could also be applied to long-standing needs that have received less attention.
hanjingyan@chinadaily.com.cn
