Senior Tech Tip: Live Captions

by Russ Alman, WVSAC Communications Director

Screenshots from Innocaption for iPhone. InnoCaption by default will use AI-based captioning, but has the option for a live human assistant if needed. Both options are free to use.

​Both Apple and Google have a variety of built-in tools in their smartphone and tablet operating systems to help people who have aural, visual or physical disabilities. I could easily cover one of these tools every month and fill this column for a couple of years

Live Caption in both Android and iOS devices is very similar. Once enabled, captions are overlaid on any app where speaking is detected.

That’s great news for seniors because many of these tools can assist you as you age.

For this month’s column, I’m going to focus on one of the lesser known tools — live captioning. This tool is relatively new because it requires significant processing power within the device, plus the cloud (online) services to support it.

Phones and tablets have been able to speak text to you for a while now, either speaking the available options that are on the screen or even the contents of emails and texts. This is what’s commonly called “text to speech.” The reverse is also true: there is an option in most phones for you to speak text and have it appear on the screen (voice recognition).

With live captions, however, your device is able to listen to the voice audio of a telephone call or video and add captions in real time.

I think this feature is huge because the majority of seniors experience hearing loss as they age. That limits their ability to accurately communicate with others.

Thanks to a federally-funded program, there are now a number of downloadable apps available that add live captioning to phone calls.

In addition, both Apple and Android devices have live captioning built into the operating system now and if your phone is capable of receiving the latest software updates, the feature is probably already available. You just need to know how to turn it on and operate it.

I’ll talk about both these options and you can decide which might work better for your needs.

As I mentioned, federal law now requires that phone users with hearing loss have access to live captioning during phone calls. This has allowed a number of companies to create live captioning phone applications that are free to download and use. You’ll want to make sure that app you choose states that it’s FCC certified to work under the approved program. When you download the app, you have to declare that you need the live caption service because you have hearing loss.

These services work by forwarding all your calls through a special phone number assigned to you that activates the captioning service. The latest services use artificial intelligence to improve their accuracy, but there is also an option to use a live transcriptionist if the machine-based caption is not sufficient. Again, all of this is free to use.

InnoCaption (www.innocaption.com) is the app I briefly tested for the purposes of writing this article. It was easy to set up and the AI-based captioning was fast and quite accurate. I didn’t try out the access to a human transcriptionist.

InnoCaption also has the ability to save previous captioning sessions — great to going back and reviewing a conversation.
My only concern was that in order to use this service, you have to use the phone dialer that’s built into InnoCaption as your default phone dialer. This is the same with all other live captioning apps.

Live Caption is included in the Android OS. Since it’s built in at the system level, it works in any app where the system detects speaking. If a video has closed captioning built in and enabled, it will default to that first instead of using Live Caption.

You can adjust the size and color of the type and background of Live Caption in the settings, and you can adjust the size of the captioning box while it’s in use.

The Android Live Caption interface still needs a bit of work. You can disable it on the fly by swiping down on the caption box, but that completely disables it. To reenable it, you either have to go back into the system settings, or you can use the “shortcut” by pressing a volume key, pressing the three dots at the top of the volume slider and then click a little unlabeled caption icon at the top left of the ensuring dialog box. Not exactly the most intuitive access. I expect accessing Live Caption will become easier in upcoming Android releases.

Enabling Live Caption on Android is straightforward: Navigate to Settings > Accessibility > Hearing Enhancements > Live Caption and toggle the switch to turn it on. Within the Live Caption settings, you’ll want to make sure that “Live Caption in volume control” is turned on. Feel free to look through the other options and try them.

Live Caption is also included in Apple iOS and iPad OS. Setup is similar to Android devices: Navigate to Settings > Accessibility > Live Captions and toggle on Live Captions.

In my brief testing, it seemed like InnoCaption was more responsive and smoother than the built-in solutions for Apple and Android. However, InnoCaption required more set up and it only works inside their supplied phone app.

Live captions on both Android and iOS have a little bit more of a time lag, but they are still quite usable. The translation is also machine-based only (there is no option for a live transcriptionist on either platform). However, captioning works within any app where speaking  is detected, so it can be used on top of any messaging app, including Facetime, Messenger, WhatsApp, or even video in a web browser.

For my personal use, I’ll probably use Android OS Live Caption. While my hearing is thankfully still good, I find it hard to focus on phone conversations in a noisy environment, so having the captions on screen as I listen to the caller could be helpful.

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