Google Rolled out two Fascinating Features for Android phone users with difficulty in hearing

Google lunched two new features on Android phones, today, these features are meant to help the estimated 900 million people around the whole world who the World Health Organization has foretold will be suffering from hearing loss in the year 2055. The features are two applications for Android called Sound Amplifier and Live Transcribe both functions just as their names implies.

The app called Live Transcribe takes real-world speech and converts it into real-time captions using the android phone’s microphone, while Sound Amplifier app helps to filter, augment and amplify sounds around the user environment. It does increase quiet sounds and do not over-boosting loud sounds, it can also be customized using sliders and toggles that can be used to reduce noise thereby minimizing distractions in the background.

The Sound Amplifier app will be available in google Play Store today for Android users, the Live Transcribe will start rolling out in a limited beta version today through the Play Store.

Google showed how to use the apps by spotlighting the work of Dimitri Kanevsky, research scientist at google, who has worked on speech recognition and communications technology about 30 years. “Through his work, Dimitri — who has been deaf since early childhood — has helped shape the accessibility technologies he relies on. One of them is CART: A service where a captioner virtually joins a meeting to listen and create a transcription of spoken dialogue, which then displays on a computer screen. Dimitri’s teammate, Chet Gnegy, saw the challenges Dimitri faced using CART: He always carried multiple devices, it was costly and each meeting required a lot of preparation. This meant Dimitri could only use CART for formal business meetings or events, and not everyday conversations.”

“We thought: What if we used cloud-based automatic speech recognition to display spoken words on a screen? A prototype was built and Googlers across a bunch of our offices — from Mountain View to Taipei — got involved. The result is Live Transcribe, an app that takes real-world speech and turns it into real-time captions using just the phone’s microphone.”

The app helps people who are deaf or have difficulty hearing, greater independence in their day to day interactions. A person like Dimitri, who’s now closer to his loved ones and now able to effectively communicate with his grand children without the help of other family members.