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Smartphones have changed significantly and now have several accessibility features designed to help those with disabilities or impairments. Android phones have a wide range of accessibility features, one of which is Live Transcribe, which turns speech into text and is designed to help people with hearing loss. The app captures audio by listening to the environment and generating captions on the screen when it detects words. It can also alert users to sounds like door knocks, doorbells, and sirens, reference previously transcribed audio with robust search functionality, and even alert users when their name is spoken aloud.
But with Android phones not making Live Transcribe apparent and needing settings to be tweaked for the best experience, it’s useful to know how to use it effectively.
To activate Live Transcribe, you first need to download the Live Transcribe app from the Google Play Store because it isn’t pre-installed on all Android devices. When you open the app, give it access to your phone’s microphone and it should begin to function automatically.
The app will display words spoken in the language it’s set to on the screen. To change the language, tap the language button at the bottom of the app’s main screen. The app will also detect other sounds than speech, displaying them on the bottom left of the screen. Common detected sounds include knocking, music, and car horns, among others.
One of the most useful accessibility functions in Live Transcribe is Sound Notifications, which run in the background and push out a notification whenever certain sounds are detected, such as a fire alarm, a dog barking, or water running. To turn on Sound Notifications,