Communicating with people who lip-read, while wearing a mask

We posted about Google’s excellent Live Transcribe app here last year, an incredibly useful tool for deaf and hard of hearing people. Using Google’s highly accurate speech recognition it transcribes what is being spoken to high visibility text on your mobile device screen. As well as speech is also generates sound labels for things like laughter, music, alarms and dog barks (among other things). Little did we realise when writing the post linked above how Live Transcribe would become even more useful, without any major updates. Many people in the deaf and hard of hearing community use lip reading as an alternative, or to augment their hearing, when communicating with someone. Obviously, with everyone wearing masks this is no longer possible. The tweet above Danny Hughes (@SECAmb_Danny ) shows how he uses Live Transcribe to ensure he is understood. A very creative use of the technology and one even Google probably didn’t foresee. Live Transcribe is Android only but there are alternatives on iOS that could be used in a similar way, maybe try Hearing Helper – Live Captions.

Live Transcribe is also handy for note-taking as you can copy and paste from the transcription 😉

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