Hearing aid technology has come a long way in the last few years, allowing those with hearing loss to experience improved sound quality and health. Besides hearing aids, there are several apps available to support those with hearing loss. Let’s take a look at some of the best options.
Rogervoice
Rogervoice is an app that provides transcription for your calls. It’s fast, reliable, and best of all it’s completely free. This application uses both auto speech recognition and speech synthesis. Users with hearing loss can make calls and then read the live transcription directly on their smartphone. To participate in the call, users can reply with voice or by typing into the keypad. Rogervoice includes features such as call log, text-to-speech, dial-tone navigation and contact syncing.
Google Live Transcribe
The Google Live Transcript App relies on ASR technology to provide speech to text transcriptions. The app picks up the speech with a mic and then uses wifi to transfer it to the phone screen. It’s handy for those who are hard of hearing to use in meetings, conferences or seminars. You can access this technology in 70 + languages, so there’s no need to worry about anything getting lost in translation.
Braci
This sound-recognition app works to analyze sounds and then convert them to alerts that can be seen or felt. Braci can detect a huge range of sounds, and send alerts to your phone as a notification. For example, if the user hasn’t heard the doorbell or smoke alarm, they’ll receive a message from Braci. The application can also pick up sounds such as carbon monoxide alarms and gas alarms. Using this app, you don’t need to be close to the sound source, you can simply read the notification and know which sound needs your attention. To improve safety around the home, and manage your hearing loss, Braci is the perfect app.
AVA
Ava allows users to participate in group calls, and functions to provide transcriptions of the conversation. Users receive the transcript on the screen of their iphone, complete with the names of the callers who are speaking. Even those with slight hearing loss can benefit from using this app. It can often be difficult to follow a convo, when lots of people are participating at the same time. With the use of AVA, those with hearing loss can ease the stress of these situations, and access an enhanced experience.
All of the above apps can be used easily with hearing aids, offering support for remote working, or connecting with friends on calls. During the current pandemic, it’s important for us to stay connected with family and friends. It may be that you are unable to meet up in person during this time, yet with technology like this, group calls are a whole lot easier. Lastly, if you are regularly using the Zoom video conferencing platform, try out the Otter AI integration, for transcriptions of your Zoom calls.
