Google’s Live Transcribe is making conversations more accessible to everyone

Google has just announced a free Android service that makes real-world conversations more accessible by everyone. Live Transcribe is a service that brings the power of automatic captioning into everyday conversational use. Powered by Google Cloud, it is able to caption conversations in real-time and it even supports over 70 different languages. 

Get started with Live Transcribe

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that there are 466 million people around the world that are hard of hearing. A crucial technology in empowering day-to-day communication and inclusive access to the world’s information to this population is Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Google’s ASR is also behind automated captions in Youtube, presentations in Slides and also phone calls.

We went over to Google’s office in Singapore earlier today to speak with Sagar Savla, Product Manager of Machine Perception. The above video is a quick demonstration of Live Transcribe in action.

The above GIF is a glimpse into an impressive user experience that you can expect from this Android service. The loudness and noise indicator is made of two concentric circles. The inner brighter circle, indicating the noise floor, tells a deaf user how audibly noisy the current environment is. The outer circle shows how well the speaker’s voice is received. Together, the circles visually show the relative difference intuitively.

Find out more in this blog post by Google!