Author: Tony Trott
I was recently thinking about the Paul Newman movie “Cool Hand Luke” 
and one of the most famous lines in Hollywood history: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
I have written before about my hearing issues and the effects thereof on my love of music, but it goes beyond music. Lack of hearing and/or understanding makes it very difficult to communicate and is extremely isolating. Before I go any farther, I want to make it clear that while I have an intense lack of hearing and discrimination (meaning many words are just jumbles in my ears), I can hear and understand to some degree, so I am not claiming to represent the deaf community.
Looking up the term isolating in the Merriam-Webster dictionary online, it gives a definition of “to set apart from others.” That’s accurate for the way I can feel in some group situations, especially where there is background noise.
Of course, there is always CART (Caption Access Realtime Translation) and having this would be great, but, for many reasons, it is not always the answer. First, not many people, even me, are going to have CART in my home, at a restaurant with a few friends, or a family gathering. It is more appropriate and realistic for a larger venue and there is also a cost factor.
Trying to find an answer to the problem that would work for 
me, I came across the Google app Live Transcribe. I don’t purport to know all about how it works, but, basically, it uses Googles voice-to-text technology to show a transcript of what is being heard by the phone’s microphone (which, of course, can include background noise, but it does a pretty good job considering it’s a free app for Android).
Live Transcribe is what I use frequently, and maybe you can try it too.
