The tech giant Google is bringing two new features to its Android platform that will help around 900 million people worldwide. Those two features are in the form of two Android applications called Live Transcribe and Sound Amplifier. And they work pretty much in the way what their names suggest. According to the WHO (World Health Organization) by year 2055 more people will suffer from hearing loss than ever, so this move from Google will help those users.
Talking about the app, the Live Transcribe app will take the real-world speech and turn it into real-time caption with the help of the microphone present in the phone. And the Sound Amplifier app will filter the sounds, it will then augment and amplify it in the environment around the user. It also increases the low frequency sounds without over-boosting the loud sounds. These apps are fully customizable according to the needs and requirements of the user. With the help of toggles and sliders present in the app users can minimize distractions in the background and reduce noise.
The good news is that the users won’t have to wait for days or months for these apps because the Live Transcribe app’s limited beta version and the Sound Amplifier app will be available on the Google Play Store from today itself. Also, these apps will be pre-installed on Google Pixel 3.
According to a report on Android blog post, Google showed how both these apps can be used and also highlighted the efforts of Dimitri Kanevsky, a research scientist who has been working on speech recognition and communications technology for the past 30 years. Dimitri himself is deaf from his early childhood, but he didn’t let that stop him. Instead he helped in increasing the accessibility of technology that he relies on.
By the year 2055, it's estimated that there will be 900 million people with hearing loss. To help, we’re making audio more accessible with new Android apps like Live Transcribe, which brings real-time captions to conversations → https://t.co/ZX8Fgv0l13 pic.twitter.com/Ddf8HVV1rt
— Google (@Google) February 4, 2019
Being deaf Dimitri Kanevsky carried multiple devices along with him in the past and most of those devices were costly. So to counter this problem he came up with a solution, to use cloud-based automatic speech recognition to display spoken words on the screen, and using this idea a prototype was built. And the final result is the Live Transcribe that turns speech into real-time captions by the use of smartphone’s microphone. In turn making it easier for deaf people to communicate with one another.
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