That is big news if it's actually good enough to use. People have been trying to build sign-to-text and sign-to-speech systems for decades and they've never been usable.

The videos show it translating ASL as it's naturally used; without making the users adapt their signing to English grammar. That's a big leap forward.

There's a huge list of "low hanging fruit" that are at the same time niche enough or low-user enough that no one has taken a stab at it so far. Or, if they did, they were expensive / captive / terrible ux solutions. Goog has the money / aura / willingness to actually do something about it, and put things in people's hands. Really cool stuff. We already have "star trek" technology in CotS phones, it's mind blowing.