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Sign language is a crucial mode of communication for individuals who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, and a reliable sign language recognition system can greatly aid in bridging the communication gap. According to statistics provided by the Government of India, there are only around 250 accredited sign language interpreters in India, servicing a deaf population of 1.8 million to 7 million individuals. This paper presents a real-time sign language recognition system for Indian Sign Language (ISL) using YOLOv8 for object detection. The system uses a single convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to process the entire image in one forward pass and predict the bounding boxes and class probabilities for each sign in the image. The results of the study demonstrate the feasibility and potential of the system in revolutionizing communication for the deaf and hard of hearing community and have applications in gesture-controlled robotics, home automation, game control, human-computer interaction, and sign language interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]