“It’s actually really complicated,” he said. That in itself is a hard service to find, Duchemin pointed out. The transcripts all go to the person’s Ava app, letting them check through at their leisure or share with the rest of the meeting. (There are questions of privacy and confidentiality here, but they will differ case by case and are secondary to the fundamental capability of a person to participate.) Individual speakers are labeled, automatically if an app supports it, like Zoom, or by having people in the meeting click a link that attaches their identity to the sound of their voice. And the languages they are available in are limited as well.Īs Duchemin explained, it began to seem much more practical to have a separate transcription layer that is not specific to any one service. For instance Meet’s ephemeral captions, while useful, only last a moment before disappearing, and are not specific to the speaker, making them of limited use for a deaf or hard of hearing person trying to follow a multi-person call. “Use cases have shifted dramatically, and people are discovering the fact that most of these tools are not accessible,” co-founder and CEO Thibault Duchemin told TechCrunch.Īnd while some tools may have limited captioning built in (for example Skype and Google Meet), it may or may not be saved, editable, accurate or convenient to review. Extremely useful, of course, but when meetings stopped being in rooms and started being in Zooms, things got a bit more difficult. Start up the app and it would instantly hear and transcribe speech around you, color-coded to each speaker (and named if they activate a QR code). Riding the wave, the company just announced two new products and a $4.5 million seed round.Īva previously made its name in the deaf community as a useful live transcription tool for real-life conversations. Having office chatter occur in text rather than speech is more accessible, but virtual meetings are no easier to follow than in-person ones - which is why real-time captioning startup Ava has seen a huge increase in users. The worldwide shift to virtual workplaces has been a blessing and a curse to people with hearing impairments.
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