My mother is slowly going deaf. She has now passed the point where hearing aids can give her something like normal hearing and she is getting somewhat depressed over it. One thing that she finds most annoying is using the telephone.
Does anybody have experience of using voice recognition software for live speech-to-text over the phone? I know there are products available which can be used for dictation, but my understanding was that they need to be trained to the speakers voice. I guess 100% accuracy is not so vital in this application if it is at least phonetically close.
She is quite elderly but not scared of using laptops so long as someone can set it up for her.
If you’re in America, you can do better than voice recognition: You can get a real person to do the transcription for you, in real-time, often for free. This will usually be more accurate than voice recognition software. Disability laws require telecom companies to provide relay services for deaf/hard-of-hearing users. There are also websites like i711.com and ip-relay.com that do the same thing without going through your actual phone provider.
Some providers offer “voice carry over”, which lets your mother talk to the other person and the operator type back for her.
I have several deaf clients and the relay service works very nicely, although there is a slight lag, of course. I have moderately severe hearing loss and my hearing aid specifically recognizes the magnet in a phone and adjusts for phone use automatically.
Make certain her phone is hearing aid compatible. Not all phones are, and it makes a difference.
At the bottom of that page, it links to a product called CapTel which functions much like a regular telephone except it connects to a (human) captioning service and displays the text as it’s being spoken. There’s even a free smartphone version, presumably funded by national or state disability programs (it doesn’t say)…
Just saw that your location said London. It seems like text relay is available in the UK, but captioned telephony is not yet… though there’s at least one group working on it. (I don’t live there, so if I’m wrong about any of that please correct me).
And as a side note, it seems like the captioning services use a computer to do the captioning with a real human standing by to correct mistakes. Best of both worlds, maybe – speed and accuracy.
Thanks for the replies. Unfortunately she is not in the US and afaikt similar services in the UK are not currently so ubiquitous.
I have just been playing around with evernote on my android phone. It uses a Google voice recognition service to allow speech-to-text. Perhaps if I can find a published api I could create an app to automatically transcribe calls on android. How cool would that be!
Oh just a hint…what kind of HA does she have? If she has ITE aids have her try BTEs…the power might be enough so she doesn’t need some sort of voice reconnition stuff.