Subtitles for Humans

Hey y'all, this is Timothy from A Company that Makes Everything™.

I'd like to show you a project I created to help people communicate in a world where everyone wears masks.

The streaming services all have subtitles, why don't we have Subtitles For Humans?

It's on the edge of being possible and this proves it.

I created this app using Xamarin, a development tool used to create cross-platform apps that run on both iOS and Android operating systems.

The app uses Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to transcribe speech to text. I combined that with a variable-speed queue in a single-word speed-reader style.

The end goal of this project is that each word is eventually transmitted over bluetooth from the phone in your pocket to your mask so that subtitles appear over your mouth, adding back the cues we need for effective communication.

I don't have a bluetooth display to try this with so I did what hackers do and I used what I had on hand.

I own an iPhone 6S Plus, so I modified an existing 3d model, chopped off the top so I could slide the phone in, added lanyard mounts and 3d printed it so I could demo the app for you.

To scale code like this to a bunch of users costs money, Azure Speech to Text at the time of this video costs about $1 dollar per hour of transcribed text.

I can't afford to foot that bill without creating a revenue stream so it's not possible to release this on the app stores at this time without figuring that out but I hope you like the concept and I hope it inspires you to build something useful to help us to understand each other and be better humans.

Thanks.

Credits

The iPhone 6s Plus lanyard case was derived from zlagger's model with modifications that I made in TinkerCad
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1746761
iPhone 6s Plus Case - Improved by zlagger is licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution license.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/