
Ask HN: Assistive Tools for Deaf and Dumb (Voice to Text) - ashraymalhotra
I was talking to a friend who&#x27;s cousin has been deaf and dumb since birth. They tried giving her &quot;implants&quot; to make her hear but the background noise made it intolerable. Given the breakthrough in Voice to text technologies recently, I took it for granted that she would be able to understand any conversation around but apparently she isn&#x27;t able to make out anything people say and sometimes gets sad because of that (on quite a few occasions she can successfully lip read though).<p>Something even as simple as a continuous background voice to text converter, and when she wants to &quot;talk&quot; a text to voice converter should be much better for her than her current status (my assumption is she always has a laptop or mobile screen in front of her).<p>This should be as simple as integrating some Voice to text and text to voice APIs from anywhere (say Google cloud, assuming internet connectivity isn&#x27;t a problem?)<p>This seems incredibly basic and I assume systems like this should exist! If not, I could hack it over a weekend. Could you please link me to the existing tools you know to solve this problem for folks with hearing problems?
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hluska
There are quite a few options. I am not deaf, but I did quite a bit of damage
when I was young and stupid. Of these, I've only tried Dragon Dictation as I'm
too stubborn/embarrassed to try other options or get hearing aids.

\- Ava - Ava sounds good and it used to be called Trancense. I'll try this one
first once I get over my stupid shit -
[https://www.ava.me](https://www.ava.me)

\- Dragon dictation is really helpful in meetings.

\- Speaksee is raising money right now, but if it works as well as advertised,
it would be a dream. I have more trouble hearing on my phone than in person
(unless there's lots of background noise) - [https://www.speak-
see.com](https://www.speak-see.com)

\- I'd like to try Texthear, but I'm an iOS user and their pricing model on
iOS ($0.30 a minute sold in 30 minute blocks) is fucking insane. The download
comes with 30 seconds preloaded, but that's not much to test it on the
speakers I have the most trouble with. The Android app is free.
[https://texthear.com](https://texthear.com)

One thing to note is that for many of these technologies, the quality of your
mic is important. Another thing to note is that they're not particularly
discrete. If they're like me, they might find that the speech to text problem
is easier to solve than the stigma of using one.

~~~
ashraymalhotra
Just curious, when online, I would expect Google Speech to text models to
outperform most of the offline only models. I also believe for text to speech
their wavenet models are one of the best available for developers?

[https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/streaming-
recog...](https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/streaming-
recognize#speech-streaming-mic-recognize-python)

~~~
hluska
If you're looking into developing something, if I were you, I would look at
three things.

1.) Form factor - it's amazing how much of this industry relies on either
hearing aids or holding a mic/phone in someone's face.

2.) Quality of voice - I'm lucky. I am not "deaf", I just have trouble picking
out voices at certain frequencies, or all voices if there's enough noise.
Luckily, I don't have to speak with an electronic voice. If I did, I'd want a
voice that sounds a little human and has some inflection. This is a tough
problem, but if you can solve it, the Kurzweils of the world would be playing
catch up.

3.) Targeting - I damaged my hearing when I was young, addicted to very very
loud music (especially live) and not particularly bright. I'm in my forties
and still not particularly comfortable using assistive technology. If I were a
teen, I'd be fucking mortified to use any of these. Fuck, I could have easily
failed high school because of that. I can't escape the feeling that there's a
market for people like me. I would love an audiologist's office with tattoos
and Bad Religion. If that feeling came to an assistive device, I'd be a
customer.

Of course, I'm a weirdo and it's not always the best idea to start a company
to cater to a weirdo!! :)

