Google develops an application that causes speech to text in real time on a smart phone for the hearing impaired

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) , around 466 million people worldwide are hearing impaired, and that number seems to increase to 900 million by 2050. Hearing impaired people do not hear people's voice at all, or they do not hear at all, so inconvenience often occurs when talking, which makes it difficult for them to get into communication shortage or to make a lecture. In order to support such hearing-impaired people, Google developed the application " Live Transcribe (voice transcription) " that converts voice to text and the hearing aid " Sound Amplifier (voice amplification) ".

Google AI Blog: Real-time Continuous Transcription with Live Transcribe
https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/02/real-time-continuous-transcription-with.html

Making audio more accessible with two new apps
https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/accessibility/making-audio-more-accessible-two-new-apps/

There is an automatic speech recognition software that automatically converts speech to closed caption as an important technology to support hearing impaired people. Still many people are forced to pay a burden such as hiring a voice transcriber manually, but if the software automatically converts the external voice into subtitles, communication between the hearing-impaired and the healthy person greatly increases It should be improved.

Therefore, in order to support deaf people, Google developed the Android application "Live Transcribe" which automatically transcribes the voice to text. Live Transcribe covers over 70 languages and dialects, and indeed can support over 80% of the world population.

This is a movie that explained about Live Transcribe developed by Google.

Android Accessibility: Live Transcribe


A man with hearing impairments sitting in front of the camera.

Even if a person in front of me is moving his mouth, I can not hear what you are talking about ......

When I looked at the smartphone at hand, the words of the person speaking in front of my eyes were displayed in text in near real time.

Male is Mr. Dimitri Kanevsky, Google researcher. I lost my hearing completely at a young age, and since then I have lived in a world without sound.

Kanevsky, who has been researching speech recognition technology and communication technology over the past thirty years, has developed Live Transcribe, an application that cooperates with other researchers to transcribe voices to text in near real time.

Mr. Kanevsky says that it was a dream of life to do close communication with a healthy person in real time.

By using Live Transcribe, Mr. Kanevsky has become able to enjoy "conversation" among friends.

Also, Live Transcribe was introduced to Gallaudet University , a university for hearing impaired people, and he received good feedback.

Not only is the lecture done in response to the hearing impaired ... ...

Some professors also have hearing impairment. Mr. Mohammed Obiedat is one of them.

Mr. Obiedat 's two sons are healthy people and sign language is not that good yet.

However, by using Live Transcribe it became clear that the son's spoken words could be understood in real time.

Live Transcribe can be a tool to connect hearing impaired people and healthy people.

Mr. Obiedat says "Information is powerful," and that Live Transcribe will bring power to the hearing impaired.

Live Transcribe sends voice data to the cloud server and converts the voice to text on the server side, enabling high-precision text conversion. On the other hand, excessive data communication hinders users' burden and real-time conversion, so it seems that voice data is minimized on the device before sending it to the server.

Also, in addition to Live Transcribe, Google also released an application "Sound Amplifier" that clears caller voice when the background is noisy. This application can be used with Android devices connected with wired headphones and earphones, amplifies the sound of the microphone to remove noise, making it easier to hear the sound more.

The beta version of Live Transcribe has been released and will be available for subscription and will be preinstalled on " Pixel 3 " which received the latest update to be released in the future It is. The Sound Amplifier is also available on the Google Play store, it seems to be available for Android devices since Android 9 Pie.

Speech Transliteration - Apps on Google Play

Audio amplification - Apps on Google Play