First phone app for hearing impaired to come to Android soon

According to statistics, there are over 70 million people in the world who are suffering from profound to severe hearing loss. And obviously, they would find it extremely difficult or impossible to use mobile phones to make and take calls. But a new technology might just make it possible and its creators are raising funds to build make it a reality. It’s called RogerVoice and it’s an app that will make your calls for you and then translate in real time and give you a text transcript of what your caller is saying.

Using the VoIP platform and integrating it with automatic speech recognition (ASR), the call will not pass through any third-party who will do the transcription for you. It’s a program built from the ground up and is considered the first of its kind. Hearing impaired people will now be able to use their mobile phones to communicate with loved ones or in work-related situations. And everything remains private since there is no human go-between listening in to the call; everything is automated and there is no waiting time as well. It should work on any mobile device (just Android for now) and also supports multiple languages including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Greek and Japanese among others.

It not only benefits the hearing impaired community but even regular hearing people will also be able to use the app. It will of course help you communicate with your friends or colleagues that are hard of hearing. But it can also serve as an instant transcribe of your call, especially if it’s for business purposes. You can also easily store and archive these communications and it has an easy search function for reference. If it works properly, this will truly be a great step towards technology benefiting those who have disabilities.

They have already met their target of $20,000 to be able to start the development, but they’re still looking to raise more to reach their other milestones, like developing an iOS version and also text-to-speech features. If you believe in this project, you can visit their Kickstarter page to invest in RogerVoice.

SOURCE: Kickstarter