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dreamshark;tldr. iPhone has a feature called Live Captions that enables conversation with the hearing-impaired (or in loud venues where everyone is hearing impaired)
I've been having confabs with my lovely elderly neighbors (i.e., older than I am) about the Parking Pad Project, which have been hindered somewhat by Bill's severe hearing loss. He doesn't like to keep asking people to repeat things, and ends up missing important details. I thought there must be a solution to this problem on my overly complicated iPhone, and there is! It was hard to find, but once I set it up it's surprisingly easy to use.
The first trick with anything Apple is figuring out their terminology. It wasn't Live Speech. It wasn't Dictation (or anything that could be found online by searching on "translate speech to text."). It's Live Captions, ideally combined with the Accessibility Shortcut.
SETUP. Once you know what it's called, it's easy to find instructions on how to enable Live Captions (Settings > Accessibility > (Hearing) Live Captions. Just toggle the slider). But then it's on ALL THE TIME, which you might not want. A better approach is to scroll down to Accessibility>Shortcut and set THAT to Live Captions. That lets you toggle the feature on or off by triple-clicking the side button.
USING IT. This was the part I couldn't find any instructions for, except vague directions to "click Microphone" (where?). I finally realized that when I enabled Live Captions a tiny little black and white icon appeared in the lower left corner of my home screen. Click on THAT and you see the Microphone option. Ohhhh. Click it, and a little window opens, declaring "Listening...." Say something and text appears in the little window. You can expand the window to full screen, which makes it a lot easier to see.
MAKING THE WINDOW GO AWAY
Just swipe right and the window folds up into the little icon again. It's still listening and transcribing, just not in your face. Click the icon and the window opens again at whatever size it was at when you closed it, so I think keeping it at full screen works the best.
I've been having confabs with my lovely elderly neighbors (i.e., older than I am) about the Parking Pad Project, which have been hindered somewhat by Bill's severe hearing loss. He doesn't like to keep asking people to repeat things, and ends up missing important details. I thought there must be a solution to this problem on my overly complicated iPhone, and there is! It was hard to find, but once I set it up it's surprisingly easy to use.
The first trick with anything Apple is figuring out their terminology. It wasn't Live Speech. It wasn't Dictation (or anything that could be found online by searching on "translate speech to text."). It's Live Captions, ideally combined with the Accessibility Shortcut.
SETUP. Once you know what it's called, it's easy to find instructions on how to enable Live Captions (Settings > Accessibility > (Hearing) Live Captions. Just toggle the slider). But then it's on ALL THE TIME, which you might not want. A better approach is to scroll down to Accessibility>Shortcut and set THAT to Live Captions. That lets you toggle the feature on or off by triple-clicking the side button.
USING IT. This was the part I couldn't find any instructions for, except vague directions to "click Microphone" (where?). I finally realized that when I enabled Live Captions a tiny little black and white icon appeared in the lower left corner of my home screen. Click on THAT and you see the Microphone option. Ohhhh. Click it, and a little window opens, declaring "Listening...." Say something and text appears in the little window. You can expand the window to full screen, which makes it a lot easier to see.
MAKING THE WINDOW GO AWAY
Just swipe right and the window folds up into the little icon again. It's still listening and transcribing, just not in your face. Click the icon and the window opens again at whatever size it was at when you closed it, so I think keeping it at full screen works the best.
