Follow the conversation at the table with real-time captions on your iPhone.
Live Transcribe by Mighty Fine Apps provides real-time captions so Deaf and hard-of-hearing people can follow conversations at family dinners, holiday gatherings, and restaurant meals. It’s built for anyone who’s tired of smiling through a conversation they can only half follow, and for the spouses, adult children, and grandparents who want their loved one back in the conversation.
The problem it solves is a familiar one. You can hear that people are talking. You catch the volume, the laughter, the shape of sentences. What you miss are the words, and at a family table those words are the whole point: the story your granddaughter is telling, the plans being made for next weekend, the joke everyone laughed at a half-second before you did. Live Transcribe puts those words on your screen as they’re spoken.
Why family meals are one of the hardest listening situations
Dinner tables, whether at home or in a restaurant, combine almost every difficult listening condition at once:
- Multiple people talk, interrupt, and change topics quickly
- Background noise from dishes, music, or a busy restaurant competes with voices
- People talk while looking at their food, so lip reading is often impossible
- Voices come from different directions and distances around the table
- Hearing aids amplify everything, including the clatter and the table next to you
This is exactly the environment Live Transcribe is designed for. In Mighty Fine Apps’ side-by-side testing, noisy restaurant conditions are where Live Transcribe’s accuracy advantage over built-in options like Apple Live Captions is largest. The app is built around noise robustness because for hard-of-hearing users, a noisy dinner is where captions matter most. Color-coded speaker separation also helps you follow who’s saying what when several family members are talking. The point isn’t the technology, though. It’s that you still belong at the table, and the captions are just what keeps you there.
How to use Live Transcribe at a family meal
Before the meal
- Open Live Transcribe on your iPhone
- Set your text size so you can read comfortably at a glance
- Place your phone flat on the table, roughly between you and the people you most want to hear
During the meal
- Read captions in real time while staying part of the conversation
- Move the phone closer to a quiet talker or a storytelling grandchild when needed
- Let the captions catch the details you’d otherwise ask someone to repeat
After the meal
- Review the transcript if plans or details were discussed, like dates, addresses, or who’s bringing what to Thanksgiving
- Delete or save it, it’s your conversation
What to know about accuracy and limitations
Live Transcribe works best when the microphone can clearly hear the person speaking. At a large table, the app will caption nearby voices more accurately than someone at the far end. Moving the phone closer to the person you want to follow makes a real difference.
In busy restaurants, the app may occasionally pick up fragments from neighboring tables. Positioning the phone toward your own group helps it focus on the right voices.
Live Transcribe is an iOS app for iPhone and iPad, offered as a paid subscription with a free trial. It complements hearing aids rather than replacing them: hearing aids make sound louder, while captions make speech clear when louder still isn’t enough.
Real examples
From an App Store reviewer whose mother has profound hearing loss:
“My mother was overwhelmed with joy at finally being able to understand the details of everything we are saying. She was able to participate in conversations like she has not been able to do for 20 years.”
Another family put it simply:
“We use this during dinner to make sure our deaf family member is included and doesn’t miss anything.”
And from an 85-year-old reviewer, married 63 years, who used the app at a family Thanksgiving:
“I never missed a conversation! You’ve given me my life back.”
Frequently asked questions
Can Live Transcribe keep up with a fast family conversation?
Yes. Live Transcribe captions speech in real time and uses color-coded speaker separation to help you follow multiple people. Very rapid crosstalk with everyone speaking at once is difficult for any captioning technology, but normal back-and-forth conversation captions well.
Does Live Transcribe work in noisy restaurants?
Yes, and noisy environments are where the app is most differentiated. Its speech recognition is built to handle background noise, music, and competing voices. Placing the phone closer to your conversation partners improves accuracy further.
Does Live Transcribe work with hearing aids?
Yes. It works alongside hearing aids using the iPhone’s microphone rather than connecting to the hearing aids directly. Many users wear hearing aids and read captions when amplification alone doesn’t make speech clear.
Does it need an internet connection?
No. Live Transcribe includes offline transcription, so it works at a cabin, a restaurant with bad reception, or grandma’s house with no Wi-Fi password in sight.
Is this the Android app from Google?
No. Live Transcribe by Mighty Fine Apps is an independent iOS app for iPhone and iPad, available on the Apple App Store. Google Live Transcribe is a separate, unrelated Android app.
Live Transcribe has a free trial on the App Store. Put your phone on the table at your next family dinner and see what you’ve been missing.
The team behind Live Transcribe.
