When You Can’t Hear,

Turn To Your Smartphone

By Tak Sato

I’ve always had a glass-half-full outlook. In retrospect, it has helped me cope with and overcome many challenges. I also am proud to call myself an old geek with over 30 years in the digital world, using the knowledge I’ve gained to help older adults master technology.

When I lost my hearing in 2020 for unknown reasons, “idiopathic” in medical parlance, I went into a problem-solving mode to cope with the world of silence I suddenly landed in. My goal was to maintain normal communication, as normal as possible, anyway, with family and friends. As you’d expect from a geek, the solution was under my nose via technology.

Although a cochlear implant (CI) brought back my hearing in the summer of 2021, I used my smartphone while deaf for 14 months leading up to CI surgery. For many older adults, being hard of hearing (HoH) is a spectrum; some people have a difficult time making out all the words in a spoken sentence while on the other extreme, some people are legally deaf.

A Smartphone To The Rescue

Smartphones have many built-in features. One of them is their ability to transcribe or translate speech-totext. Simply tap the microphone icon on the virtual keyboard that pops up on the screen when you want to type something within an app. Whether you are HoH or not, this handy feature

“reads” what the other person is saying and transcribes it to the screen. Anyone can use this built-in speech-to-text feature instead of trying to type into the phone’s virtual keyboard.

All smartphones, regardless of make or model, have an “Accessibility” category in their “Settings” app. The items under Accessibility include features to (hopefully) make it easier to use your smartphone when your body’s senses — auditory, visual and motor skills — present challenges. Accessibility enables you to manipulate audio sounds, increase text size, activate your smartphone using your voice, and more.

“Live Transcribe,” an item within Accessibility under “Vision,” which also has a standalone app that is made by Google for Android, is free and what I relied on heavily during the 14 months before CI. I still use it occasionally. The list under “Vision” has expanded; “Live Caption” for Android captions anything that is playing, including what is streaming, on your smartphone.

WHAT ABOUT IPHONES?

Has Apple been sleeping at the wheels? Hardly. Last fall it introduced its own Live Caption Accessibility feature for iPhones. Apple’s version does it one better than Google’s Live Caption by also captioning telephone conversations in real-time.

Captioning telephone conversations is currently exclusive to Google’s “Pixel” Android smartphones. I hope that this feature will be enabled for other Android smartphones from all manufacturers soon.

Although the label says “BETA,” I’ve tested Apple’s Live Captain Accessibility and it is quite good already. If you carry an iPhone that is supported by Apple and receives operating system updates (currently version 16.x), try enabling Live Captions under Accessibility to see for yourself (“Settings” app → scroll down to “Accessibility” → turn on “Live Captions”).

Wider availability of telephone conversation real-time captioning, regardless of the make or model of the Android smartphone, will help HoH people of all ages. We’ve been given a tool with unlimited potential. Why not maximize it?

Tak Sato is the founder of the Cleveland-area nonprofit Center for Aging in the Digital World (empowerseniors.org) which teaches digital literacy to people 60+ through the free Discover Digital Literacy program.