Ho Chi Minh City Students Build DotBridge, an AI App That Reads Vietnamese Braille and Turns It Into Speech

A group of students in Ho Chi Minh City has developed DotBridge, an app that uses artificial intelligence to recognise Vietnamese Braille and convert it into text and speech, Thanh Niên reported on November 11. The project won first prize in the social impact category of a programme run by the British Consulate-General in Ho Chi Minh City. Nguyễn Hoàng Trọng Nghĩa, a student at the University of Science, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, said team members from different backgrounds combined their skills to build it.

The idea came when the team read about children learning to write Braille and saw letters the children had written that nobody around them could read. Looking into the problem, the students found that tools for converting Vietnamese Braille were limited: most international tools focus on other languages, and popular AI models do not yet handle direct recognition and translation of Vietnamese Braille well. For someone who does not know Braille, reading a passage means checking symbols one by one, which is slow and error-prone.

What it means in practice

DotBridge uses a phone camera to recognise Braille symbols and turn them into text and voice. The team also built a learning path from basic to advanced Braille, with games to help users remember the symbols. Team member Nguyễn Kiều Xuân Hậu said the hardest part was data: because training material for Vietnamese Braille recognition is scarce, the students had to research, build and standardise their own dataset. Camera recognition is also sensitive to lighting, angle, distance and image quality, so the team combined computer vision, data processing and AI, testing repeatedly to build a pipeline from image to text to speech.

Ngô Sĩ Kha, a senior adviser at the university system’s innovation centre, praised the students’ focus on social impact and the project’s potential to scale. DotBridge joins other accessibility work in the country, such as the aids for blind users among the 750 apps from Google’s AI Riser Vietnam 2026, and comes from a university system that has committed VND 1.875 trillion to AI, chip, robotics and quantum labs. What to watch is whether DotBridge moves from a prize-winning prototype to an app that schools for visually impaired children can use, and whether its Vietnamese Braille dataset is shared with other developers.