Digital health for hearing impaired people includes assistive devices and hearing aids plus services such as captioning for telephones, smartphones, and other devices. Earlier this year, we wrote about ClearCaptions’ Internet Protocol Captioned Telephone Service. The ClearCaptions speech-to-text caption service uses automatic speech recognition to assist people with hearing impairments communicate with healthcare professionals when a live communications assistant is not available to type captions in real-time.
In January in Las Vegas at CES 2022, Gallaudet University Technology Access Program (TAP) and AppTek will introduce GoVoBo, a universal automatic captioning and translation application. According to an AppTek news release, Gallaudet and AppTek created GoVoBo for the deaf and hard of hearing to fill the need for an automatic user-centric captioning tool that works with any online meeting service or application that uses spoken language. Captioning tools exist for many programs, but users must configure them for each program. GoVoBo Is a universal app that users need to install just once.
GoVoBo uses AI-enabled speech recognition to display captions during online conversations and meetings. The software also provides an editable transcript when the event ends. in addition, the app translates foreign languages automatically and instantly with neural network machine translation, according to AppTek. Thew Gallaudet and AppTek news release did not specify which languages the program can translate nor how the number of languages available product launch or in the future. The announcement didn’t mention how GoVoBo will be distributed or the cost. People who visit the GoVoBo booth #60527 at the Venetian on January 5 will have a chance to claim one of 200 free early-adopter accounts.
