Live Transcribe & Notification

Research at Google

About this app

Live Transcribe & Sound Notifications makes everyday conversations and surrounding sounds more accessible among people who are deaf and hard of hearing, using just your Android phone or tablet.

On most devices, you can directly access Live Transcribe & Sound Notifications with these steps:
1. Open your device's Settings app.
2. Tap Accessibility, then tap Live Transcribe, or Sound Notifications, depending on which app you’d like to start.
3. Use the Accessibility button, gesture or quick setting (https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/7650693) to start Live Transcribe or Sound Notifications.

Sound Notifications:
• Get notified of potential risky situations and personal situations based on sounds happening at home (for example, smoke alarm, siren, baby sounds).
• Add custom sounds to get notified when your appliances beep.• Get notifications with a flashing light or vibration to your mobile device or wearable.
• Timeline view lets you go back in history (currently limited to 12 hours) to see what was happening around you.

Real-time transcription:
• Transcribes in real-time. Text appears on your device as words are spoken.
• Choose from over 80 languages and dialects, and quickly switch between two languages.
• Add custom words that you use frequently, like names or household items.
• Set your device to vibrate when someone says your name.
• Type responses in your conversation. Bring up your device’s keyboard and type your words for a continuous dialogue. Transcriptions still appear while you type.
• See the volume of the speaker’s voice compared to the loudness in your environment. You can use this sound indicator to adjust your volume when you speak.
• Use external microphones found in wired headsets, Bluetooth headsets, and USB mics for better audio reception.

Referring back to transcription:
• Choose to save transcriptions for 3 days. Saved transcriptions will stay locally on your device for 3 days, so you can copy and paste them elsewhere. (By default, transcriptions are not saved.)
• Search within saved transcriptions.
• Touch and hold text in transcription to copy and paste.

Requirements:
• Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and up.

Live Transcribe & Sound Notifications was made in collaboration with Gallaudet University, the premier Deaf and hard of hearing university in the US.

Join the https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/accessible to provide feedback and receive product updates. For help using Live Transcribe & Sound Notifications, connect with us at https://g.co/disabilitysupport.

Permissions Notice
Microphone: Live Transcribe needs microphone access to transcribe the speech around you. The audio is not stored after the transcription is processed. Sound Notifications needs microphone access to listen for sounds happening around you. The audio is also not stored after processing is finished.
Accessibility Service: Since this app is an accessibility service, it can observe your actions.

Ratings and reviews

Not bad but needs some work. For example, it would be absolutely amazing if there where a setting to enable background transcribing. A good example, there are videos on some site I'm trying to watch. They are in a different language and I thought this app might work. However, like the others, if the app looses focus, it stops recording. And I cannot go the other way either because the website does the same.

Amazing, I use it for school, it crashes at times, but is otherwise seamless on my phone. No ads, no gimmicks, you open the app and can choose a language in settings (though only English can be used offline for now as far as I know), and it begins working. A thing about the app I noticed is sometimes it takes a minute to switch off a certain voice, this can be solved by assigning two languages, and then flipping to the second language and back to English (or the first language) and it'll work.

Useless with annoying constant reminder to turn on notifications. You have to leave your phone in the middle of a room or near what you want to monitor. In order to hear/feel/see the notifications you also have to be in the direct vicinity. Perhaps this might be useful for people with various impairments, but i fail to see how your phone can alert you any differently than an alarm of other event that you would be within a few feet of.

What's new

• Live Transcribe: Enable transcription to be more seamless regardless of connectivity.