Kristen Regelein, head of global sales at smartwatch maker Pebble – who went deaf at age three – uses a Pebble watch in business meetings to alter the volume on her hearing-aids. “My personal and professional life depends heavily on my listening and communication out to the world. When your job is to negotiate deals, it could
Voice contact with call centres, or making appointments and reservations, or simple voice-based chats with friends and coworkers are opening to profoundly deaf people, with apps. An app created in Italy, Pedius, joins Transcence, RogerVoice, VoxSense and Speak2See in making spoken dialogue visible on smartphones in group and one-to-one contexts. Read: Pedius app converts speech to text in real time At Ireland’s Web Summit in November 2014,
A new app, Transcence, is intended to give deaf people access to spoken dialogue among friends or colleagues who don’t know sign language, without using an interpreter. Read: A Smartphone-Based App That Lets You Converse With Deaf People Potential users wanting to test the app can register their interest at the Transcence website for when it exits private beta
A question that comes my way is, “where are all the deaf people?”. It’s mainly people over forty who ask this question. Many, never having met a deaf person, are full of questions about the daily challenges, peoples’ attitudes, technology and so on. Others, not wanting to cause offence, don’t voice their questions but stumble along with any