VRI promised 24/7 access and got rushed into hospitals — then Deaf patients paid the price. If we're about to do the same thing with AI avatars, what's the lesson we refuse to learn again?
Video Remote Interpreting was adopted fast, marketed hard, and billed as the future of access. A decade later, the Deaf community is still fighting hospitals and agencies over VRI quality, appropriateness, and consent — frozen screens, wrong language pairs, interpreters subbed in mid-emergency. Now AI avatars are rolling out on the same curve: rapid demos, rapid deployment, with the Deaf community often brought in late or as a marketing photo. What specifically went wrong with VRI that we have to call out now, before AI follows the same path?
Prompts to get you thinking
- Share a VRI experience that should never happen again — what exactly broke?
- Where is the line between "supplement" and "replacement" — and who gets to decide?
- What would "Deaf community actively included" look like in practice, not on a slide?
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