The TextHear - Personal Hearing Aid app is an interesting entry into the speech-to-text processing field. Similar to Google's Transcribe, it displays an on-screen conversion of speech-to-text via input from a smartphone or tablet in-built microphone or, through the microphone jack. Available for free on both Google Play and the iPhone App Store it can be download and easily installed. A WiFi or mobile data connection is necessary for the process to work, although it may work with a downloaded language pack. My testing of the app on an Android 7.0 phone resulted in very good speech-to-text recognition (very few errors) and at a reasonable rate.

One very interesting feature that the app claims is that it can turn any regular land-line phone into a caption phone. What is needed for this to work is the purchase of the Geemarc V2T10 – Voice to Text Converter adaptor. The way that the adaptor is connected to a corded landline phone and to a mobile/cell smartphone or tablet is shown in the images below. The Geemarc V2T10 is manufactured by Geemarc, a German manufacturer of phones that often have features for deaf and hard of hearing people. So, in effect, the app is supposed to work with the adaptor to provide a simple and transportable captioning system for most land-line phones. I have not tested (purchased) the phone attachment system because it's rather expensive and is only available from overseas sources. Shipping costs to Australia would also add to the overall costs.

For additional information:

- go here to the TextHear website:

https://texthear.com/

- go here to view a pdf product file:

https://texthear.com/resources/UGV2T10.pdf

- or here to the Geemarc - V2T10 product site:

http://geemarc.com/uk/product/v2t10/