Live captioning and translation application for Android

Sammanfattning: Captioning has long been used in media to help D/deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. Captioning however is difficult and time-consuming manual work. With the rapid evolution of automated speech recognition (ASR) systems, live captioning of everyday speech will soon be a practical reality. A proof of concept Android application for use with a specific headset has been created using the built-in Android SpeechRecognizer, a free open-source API (application programming interface) available for Android phones. This application unlike many existing solutions focuses on two major features, communication with in-situ microphones and hardware via bluetooth and long-duration speech recognition. Long-duration speech recognition was made possible using the segmented session mode of the SpeechRecognizer which was recently added in API version 33 (March2023). The results while not complete show promise for future development. Some initial testing shows a word error rate (WER) of 8% but further testing is required. Tests with noise also show that the system is surprisingly resistant to static noise. The application shows promise and development will continue in the coming weeks. This project was financed by Hörselforskningsfonden in project FA21-0017 and was performed under the supervision of Amin Saremi.