Google’s Live Transcribe app and service might be in beta still but that hasn’t stopped the company from adding new features. It will now provide contextual information about ambient sounds so people who are hearing impaired will be able to get more information about what’s around them.
After a brief play with Live Transcribe I’m pretty impressed.
I read a passage from a story I was writing and it not only transcribed the words with great accuracy, it was able to distinguish between the starts of new sentences and add the appropriate punctation. It was also able to add commas in some cases.
It wasn’t perfect – for example, it messed up the word “writing” and put in “rotting” but was otherwise very good.
The newly updated app can also save transcripts for up to three days so you have some time to decide what to do with the text.
Google is taking advantage of its cloud-based machine learning and speech recognition technology so it can run on less powerful phones. Which means you’ll need an internet connection to use the app. However, that could change as Google has been making significant advances in its ability to handle AI tasks on-device.
You can download the app from the Google Play Store. It’s still not officially released which means you’ll be playing with a beta so the old caveat emptor rule applies. And some of the new features aren’t there yet but once you’ve installed the app (I ran it on a Huawei Mate20 Pro) you can choose to get updates fast tracked to you.
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