A friends sister has had a stroke, and is now deaf. She wants to communicate with her but they are quite old (65) and 300 miles apart.She cant use a phone as one side is deaf. Neither is all that fast at typing… is there anyway with maybe “Smart phones” or Skyp etc she can achieve speech to text? Both have the net and computers and are willing to get smart phones etc if needed.
Windows has speech recognition built in now (Window 7 and above - not sure about Vista, probably not XP) . Look in Control Panel under the Ease of Access category.
Probably you can get more bells and whistles and perhaps better performance, if you buy a proprietary text to speech program, but the built-in one may be good enough for their needs.
Skype is a videophone program, mainly, but you can send text messages through it too, and it is free. It might meet their needs if you can hook it up to the speech to text facility. Skype belongs to Microsoft now, so it ought to all work together. The main problem I find with Skype is that connections can be a bit unreliable (but I use it for videophoning between the UK and California, so it might not be so bad for text messaging over shorter distances).
Any smart phone will do speech to text, but it isn’t perfect and the text is tiny and I think many older people would have problems going in and editing it. How do people communicate with the friends sister now?
I know years and years ago there was this service for deaf people where they had a device (TTY I am guessing) and when I worked retail occasionally I would get a call. I think the service was run by MCI, but not sure. The impression I got was the deaf person had a terminal. I would basically answer the phone and a volunteer would explain they were calling from such and such service and was I familiar with it. If you said no - they would explain that the person on the other end was hearing impaired. They would act as an interpreter - and I should act like they aren’t there and say “go ahead” when I was done with what I wanted to say. Often I’d forget and after a pause they would ask “go ahead?”.
It seemed to work pretty well. I got the impression that MCI or whoever was sponsoring it and it was staffed by volunteers. This would allow the friend to contact anyone by phone. There is virtually no learning curve on the voice side, but I am not sure if the service still exists. And it seemed to work great for what I was involved in - which was basically answering simple questions that weren’t really personal or anything. I can imagine either party might be a little more put off about a third party listening in to conversations of a more personal nature.
I’m sure someone will have a better option.
There are captioning phones, the main brand is Captel, it’s essentially a type of close captioning relay service that happens in real time, like captioning on TV.
TTY is dead or almost dead as it required some specialized knowledge to use and was eclipsed by more widespread services like email and texting.
For the past quarter century, TTY relay service has been available in every state in the USA. Just dial 711 to access it.
For more information about 711, see 711 for TTY-Based Telecommunications Relay Service | Federal Communications Commission.
Telecom operators are required by law to provide free TTY services. You call in or use a free website and a live human will transcribe what you say to and from text.
You might want to see if this company has a solution.