The One Show

The One Show is the world's most prestigious award show in advertising and design. For over 50 years, the Gold Pencil has been regarded as one of the top prizes in the creative industry. The One Show has a rich legacy of honoring some of the most groundbreaking ideas, created by some of the most remarkable minds in creativity.

Learn more about The One Show 2026

About

See the Jury

Jury Presidents

View Categories

Get Tickets

2020 One Show - Creative Use of Data

See Sound

Agency AREA 23, An FCB Health Network Company / New York + Wavio / Sonoma + Studio Rx, FCB Health Network Company / New York + SIR Design LLC / Queens

Client Wavio
BACK TO RESULTS

Annual ID

OS_CU20_009G

About the Work

The Deaf and hard of hearing lack situational awareness: the innate ability to know what’s happening around you. It’s easy to take for granted, but not being able to access sounds is disorienting and could mean life or death. Current accessibility products are extremely limited. Assistive hearing devices—like cochlear implants—help indicate or amplify sound, but don’t assign meaning to what’s heard. Other visual cues help notify of a doorbell or alarm, but are only single use. Recognizing this unmet need, we invented See Sound—the world’s first smart home hearing system. Simply plug the See Sound unit(s) directly into an outlet and connect to the app on your phone. When a sound occurs, the closest See Sound interprets it and makes a prediction based on its confidence level, alerting users on their smart devices. Training a machine-learning model to distinguish sounds requires millions of sound samples. To overcome this massive technological barrier, we leveraged a data set of over 2 million human-labeled 10-second sound clips sourced from billions of YouTube videos. Each were manually analyzed, annotated, and organized into the Google Audio Set. Our machine-learning model was trained with these data to achieve an incredibly high accuracy level.