Seoul gets its first deaf taxi drivers

A tablet PC set up inside a taxi features the "Goyohan Taxi" app to facilitate communication between deaf drivers and their passengers. / Courtesy of Coactus

By Lee Suh-yoon

Deaf people in Korea can get a driver's license if they can hear sounds louder than 55 decibels like sirens and car horns, according to the traffic law. But when it comes to taxi drivers, passengers may feel uncomfortable communicating with the driver.

However, Seoul put its first deaf taxi drivers on the road this week, by taking advantage of communication-aiding technology.

On Monday, two deaf drivers started ferrying passengers around Seoul using a special communication app developed by a local startup.

Two tablet PCs – one installed facing the back seat and the other next to the driver – act as the primary communication medium throughout the ride. Passengers convey their destinations by speaking, writing or typing into the screen.

As the taxi nears its destination, an automatic message pops up, asking the passenger to specify a drop-off point and method of payment.

Song Min-pyo, head of Coactus, the startup behind "Goyohan Taxi" app. / Courtesy of Coactus

The tablets run on an app called "Goyohan Taxi," or "Silent Taxi" in Korean, developed by a university students-led startup named Coactus.

"We wanted to provide deaf people with more job opportunities," Song Min-pyo, the head of Coactus, told the Korea Times recently. Song is a computer engineering major senior at Dongguk University in Seoul.

The app was partly inspired by similar projects by Uber to aid drivers who are hard of hearing, Song says.

"We created software to make the same initiative work in Korea," Song said. "We knew Koreans would step out of the taxi the moment the driver tried to communicate with a notepad and a pen like Uber – so we developed this app."

In June, a deaf taxi driver in Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, tested the app on his passengers.

"Before, passengers would simply get out of the taxi the moment the driver handed them a note pad asking them to write down their destination," said Lee, a sign language translator at the Korea Association of the Deaf (KAD) who worked with Coactus. "The driver told me such incidents ended after he started using the app."

The test run also helped Coactus perfect the app.

"It helped us figure out necessary design changes," Song said. "We realized more passengers used their voice rather than typing their destinations in the tablet, so we placed the voice recognition tab above all the others."

Applying the app to Seoul required more complex coordination. Over several months, Coactus made a three-way partnership between the Seoul Metropolitan Government and the KAD to train and find cabbie jobs for the hearing-impaired.

Many local taxi companies, however, rejected job applications from drivers with hearing loss, saying the lack of verbal skills was an "insurmountable" problem. Luckily, Shinshin, a local cab company in Seoul, evaluated the project positively and agreed to take part.

Coactus plans to expand its "Silent Taxi" app service from here, starting with its first big-scale project that could create around 50 taxi-driving jobs for the hard of hearing in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province.

Song hopes the app can break stereotypes and help the deaf population find more acceptance in society.

"There is still a lot of stigma, and doubt over whether the Deaf are capable of driving," Song said. "But these drivers have zero accident history and undergo a rigorous driving-suitability test like any other taxi drivers."

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