I was talking to a friend who's cousin has been deaf and dumb since birth. They tried giving her "implants" to make her hear but the background noise made it intolerable. Given the breakthrough in Voice to text technologies recently, I took it for granted that she would be able to understand any conversation around but apparently she isn't able to make out anything people say and sometimes gets sad because of that (on quite a few occasions she can successfully lip read though).<p>Something even as simple as a continuous background voice to text converter, and when she wants to "talk" a text to voice converter should be much better for her than her current status (my assumption is she always has a laptop or mobile screen in front of her).<p>This should be as simple as integrating some Voice to text and text to voice APIs from anywhere (say Google cloud, assuming internet connectivity isn't a problem?)<p>This seems incredibly basic and I assume systems like this should exist! If not, I could hack it over a weekend. Could you please link me to the existing tools you know to solve this problem for folks with hearing problems?
There are quite a few options. I am not deaf, but I did quite a bit of damage when I was young and stupid. Of these, I've only tried Dragon Dictation as I'm too stubborn/embarrassed to try other options or get hearing aids.<p>- Ava - Ava sounds good and it used to be called Trancense. I'll try this one first once I get over my stupid shit - <a href="https://www.ava.me" rel="nofollow">https://www.ava.me</a><p>- Dragon dictation is really helpful in meetings.<p>- Speaksee is raising money right now, but if it works as well as advertised, it would be a dream. I have more trouble hearing on my phone than in person (unless there's lots of background noise) - <a href="https://www.speak-see.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.speak-see.com</a><p>- I'd like to try Texthear, but I'm an iOS user and their pricing model on iOS ($0.30 a minute sold in 30 minute blocks) is fucking insane. The download comes with 30 seconds preloaded, but that's not much to test it on the speakers I have the most trouble with. The Android app is free. <a href="https://texthear.com" rel="nofollow">https://texthear.com</a><p>One thing to note is that for many of these technologies, the quality of your mic is important. Another thing to note is that they're not particularly discrete. If they're like me, they might find that the speech to text problem is easier to solve than the stigma of using one.