Back in February, Google launched two Android apps to help improve accessibility on Android. One of those apps was Live Transcribe, a live-captioning app that can transcribe speech in real-time, in multiple different languages.

Today, Live Transcribe is getting a new update to be more useful. In the past, Live Transcribe was only capable of transcribing speech — meaning importing things like background noise, or things that were actually happening were harder to capture. With today’s update, Live Transcribe can transcribe sound events, so you will now be able to tell when things are happening in the background as well as being able to transcribe speech. So for example, when a dog is barking, the app will let you know with a simple tag at the bottom.

The sound events aren’t embedded within the speech transcriptions, and instead, they are at the bottom, wrapped within little squares. It’s an interesting design choice because the sound events are so far from the actual speech transcriptions.

Google is also making it possible to locally copy and save transcripts, which is going to be really useful for students like me taking notes in lectures. I don’t have an Android phone, unfortunately.

You can get Live Transcribe from the Google Play Store here.

Tagged with Android, Google, Live Transcribe