Crowdfunding is now allowing many new startups to realize their original and innovative ideas. Another proof of concept: Transcense, a startup has developed an application that allows the deaf to transcribe their conversations on a smartphone in real time.
An international team of engineers has developed an app that allows the deaf to transcribe their conversations in real time on their smartphones and know in real time who said what, giving the deaf and hearing impaired an opportunity to participate in a discussion with several partners without even knowing about their sign language.
At first glance, conversations are like those that we make using social media or SMS, but the real innovation comes from the real-time transcription of what everyone says, even in the presence of several people.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvoglCTd6x8[/youtube]
In this video presentation, the founders of the start-up Transcense: one American, one French, one Dutch and one Taiwanese, and some of the the deaf American students express the pain of living with deafness in in everyday life. Furthermore, they emphasize that in English only one in four conversations can be read on the lips. The microphone system was programmed with algorithms that can identify each person in discussion with his voice frequency and with a code color, allowing it easy for everyone to follow the discussion in writing.
This application will be released in December (in English) and can be ordered in advance for $ 25 (about 20 euros). The team is currently raising funds on a crowdfunding site (Indiegogo) and has nearly reached its target.
Few weeks back, the researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology announced that they had developed a similar application for users of Google Glass that will allow them to transcribe conversation for a single source. The conversation is transcribed by applying Captioning on Glass.