# Vigilant Ear — Deaf Sound Alerts & Captions

> Visual and haptic sound alerts and speech transcription for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing. (iPhone/iPad app by Robert Palmer.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/vigilant-ear/id6761978703 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Robert Palmer](https://appshunter.io/developer/1892272648)
- Category: Utilities
- Price: Free with in-app purchases
- Rating: 5.00/5 from 1 App Store ratings · 1 written reviews indexed
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 26.0 · 133 MB
- Languages: American English, Arabic, French (France), German (Germany), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Chinese (Simplified, China) and 1 more
- Released: 2026-05-18
- Data updated: 2026-08-28
- Monetization: free with in-app purchases
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/vigilant-ear/id6761978703/reviews.md

## What is Vigilant Ear?

Designed for Deaf and hard-of-hearing users who rely on visual captions and alerts. It's a visual, haptic tool - not built for blind users. The interface is high-contrast dark by design, and every alert is distinguished by shape and icon — never by color alone — so it works for color-blind users, too.

Free transcribed speech captions and sound alerts. Vigilant Ear turns your iPhone into a personal sound radar for the Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and CODA community — alarms, sirens, knocks, a crying baby, severe weather, and the voices around you — shown as instant visual and haptic alerts on a live map.

Using on-device machine learning, it identifies hundreds of everyday and emergency sounds in real time, estimates their direction and rough distance, and surfaces them the moment they happen. Live captions (Speaker Mode) transcribe the people near you, separated by speaker — all on-device (nothing sent to the cloud or off-device!)

Vigilant Ear is an experimental research and accessibility aid — not a certified or life-saving device. Always use your own situational awareness.

ALWAYS FREE:
• Live captions of nearby speech (Speaker Mode), separated by speaker
• Live text to speech of captions to any bluetooth connected audio device (Beats, iPods, hearing aids)
• Real-time alerts — alarms, sirens, knocks, doorbells, a crying baby, a person approaching
• Official severe-weather warnings — US (NWS), Europe (MeteoGate), China (CMA), and Korea (KMA) — gated by geographic position of your device
• Live radar map with directional guidance, multi-target tracking, and haptics
• Alerts appear on your Apple Watch too, even when your iPhone is asleep as long as the app is running (even minimized)
• Siri, Shortcuts & Action Button — ask "What's around me?" (or type it to Siri) for a spoken-and-on-screen summary of nearby sounds, and start or stop listening hands-free
• 300+ on-device sound classifications — your audio or telemetry data never leaves your device
• Earthquake alerts if a deep rumble (infrasound) is heard with confirmation from the USGS.

POWER PACK+ — optional, one-time charge
• Translation — captions converted into your language, on-device
• Constellation — link nearby iPhones into a shared, more precise picture of sounds (acoustic mesh/biangulation/triangulation)
• Music & Sound ID — name the songs playing around you

Power Pack+ is free to try for your first 90 days; after that, captions and alerts stay free forever and a small one-time fee keeps the glamorous extras. No subscription, ever.

Privacy first: all listening, transcription, translation, and sound classification run entirely on your device. The only exception: if you use Music ID, a short audio fingerprint — never raw audio — goes to Apple's Shazam service to name the song. Compare that to other apps!

Built for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Stay aware.

THE UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR, FOR REAL
Science fiction promised a device that simply understands — no setup, no picking languages. Vigilant Ear is the closest thing yet: it detects the language being spoken on its own, separates the voices, and captions every speaker in the room in your language, live and entirely on your device. In 1.0.10+, the app can also "speak" the captions to any bluetooth enabled device such as Beats headphones, iPods, or hearing aids.

## Key features

- Visual and haptic sound alerts
- Real-time speech transcription
- On-device sound identification
- Directional sound guidance
- Severe weather alerts
- Apple Watch integration
- Siri and Shortcuts support

## Pricing and in-app purchases

Base price: Free.

**One-time purchases**

| Purchase | Price | Type |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Power Pack+ | $5.99 | one-time |


## Recent user reviews (1 of 1)

All indexed reviews: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/vigilant-ear/id6761978703/reviews.md

### 5/5 — Useful App

*2026-08-26*

I found the app to be incredibly helpful in detecting unexpected sounds and conversations. As someone who’s older, I feel more secure using this app to become more aware of my surroundings.

## Frequently asked questions about Vigilant Ear

### Does Vigilant Ear have ads?

Vigilant Ear does not contain advertisements. It is designed to be an unobtrusive aid for its users.

### What sounds can Vigilant Ear detect?

Vigilant Ear can identify over 300 everyday and emergency sounds, including alarms, sirens, knocks, a crying baby, severe weather, and nearby speech. It also offers earthquake alerts.

### Is Vigilant Ear a certified safety device?

Vigilant Ear is an experimental research and accessibility aid, not a certified or life-saving device. Users should always maintain their own situational awareness.

### How does Vigilant Ear handle privacy?

All listening, transcription, translation, and sound classification run entirely on your device. Audio or telemetry data never leaves your device, except for a short audio fingerprint for Music ID to Apple's Shazam service.

### What devices does Vigilant Ear support?

Vigilant Ear is supported on Apple Watch, iPhone, and iPad, offering alerts on your Apple Watch even when your iPhone is asleep.

### What are the 'Power Pack+' features in Vigilant Ear?

The optional Power Pack+ includes features like on-device translation of captions, Constellation for linking nearby iPhones for a more precise sound picture, and Music & Sound ID to name songs. It is free to try for 90 days.

### How often is Vigilant Ear updated?

The latest version of Vigilant Ear is 1.0.18, last updated on August 25, 2026. Updates typically include new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements.

### Can Vigilant Ear transcribe speech from multiple people?

Yes, Vigilant Ear's Speaker Mode provides live captions that transcribe nearby speech, separating it by speaker. This transcription is done entirely on-device.

## Version history (last 5 releases)

### 1.0.18 — 2026-08-25

NEW — Standing Watch. A small lamp now stands at the top of your screen, always on watch: cyan means a steady room, amber means something changed — a new voice, the room going quiet, or something approaching, with a direction when we can measure one. Red you already know. It counts voices that are speaking, never silent people.

NEW — Parla italiano! The whole app now speaks Italian — tours and live captions included.

NEW — Brazil severe-weather alerts (INMET), in Portuguese for Portuguese readers.

BETTER — Who's talking. Voice identification is faster to notice a second voice and harder to fool in noisy rooms, and named voices are never crowded out. Every voice's dot now carries its number, so two similar colors can never blur two people together.

BETTER — Battery & memory. The app travels much lighter in the background and returns instantly.

Plus portrait polish everywhere: a full-width threat strip, smarter dialogs, tidier tutorials.

### 1.0.17 — 2026-08-19

NEW — Portrait. Since day one, Vigilant Ear has made you turn your phone sideways. No more. Hold it the way you actually hold a phone: the map runs tall, the title sits under the notch, panels open full width, and the sound picker blooms straight down. Landscape is still there — it's the dense dashboard it always was. Now it's your choice.

NEW — The first sentence gets caught. The hardest words for any captioning app are the first ones after a quiet room — and for a Deaf user, "the smoke alarm is going off" is usually a first sentence. We found three separate places where those opening words could be delayed, clipped, or lost entirely, and fixed all three. Speech that arrives out of silence now gets transcribed whole, even when the app has to catch up to it.

IMPROVED — Rewind reads top-down now. The newest line pops in at the top and older lines age off the bottom, so you never hunt for "just now."

FIXED — Tutorial progress finally sticks. Chapter rings fill as you go, stay filled across app updates, and only reset when a chapter's content actually changes — because if we rewrote the tour, it's worth a fresh look.

Plus smaller portrait touches everywhere: captions that never jump when an emergency pill appears, a Shazam gauge you can actually see, and a compass that stopped hiding behind your battery indicator.

### 1.0.16 — 2026-08-18

NEW — Captions that tell you how sure they are. Every line now carries a small three-bar mark: three bars means the app heard it clearly, one bar means take it with a grain of salt. Individual words it wasn't confident about are underlined. No other captioning app admits its own uncertainty — and in a noisy room, knowing which words to trust matters as much as the words themselves.

NEW — Rewind. Missed what someone just said? One tap brings back the last thirty seconds of captions — the lines that already scrolled off your screen. Text only: no sound is kept, and nothing is ever saved to your phone.

NEW — Conversations. Show a QR code, a friend scans it, and their phone's captions join yours — their words on your screen, with their name on them. Private, over your local network, no cloud.

NEW — Direction Tones. If you hear from only one ear, sounds arrive without a direction. With earphones in, a short tone in your hearing ear says where a sound came from: three beeps is ahead, two is on your non-hearing side, one is behind you. Headphones only, and off until you turn it on.

Better captions in Japanese, Korean, Russian and Arabic, and Caption Bench now shows what's typical for each language, so a normal score doesn't look like a failure.

Plus: a heads-up if iOS sound recognition stops behaving, so a quiet phone never looks like a working one.

### 1.0.15 — 2026-08-14

NEW — The Acoustic Visualizer: music you can see. Every beat detonates a ring of light, the bass breathes, the highs rain sparkles, and the song title rides a rolling globe. Set your DJ name and colors (rainbow, pride, and more) in Preferences, then put the whole show on a TV with the scope's new Mirror button — cable or AirPlay.

NEW — Caption Bench: test caption accuracy in your language, right on your phone (Playground → Quality Check).

Captions are now far more reliable: words no longer vanish when the app switches listening sessions mid-sentence, and speaker identity holds steadier through pauses.

The Acoustic Scope now opens full screen.

### 1.0.14 — 2026-08-12

Japan and Canada now have official severe-weather alerts, from their own national agencies.

JAPAN — JMA (気象庁)
Warnings and Emergency Warnings from the Japan Meteorological Agency, for the forecast region you are actually in: storm, high waves, heavy rain, flood, heavy snow and the rest, in the agency's own wording. Japanese readers get JMA's Japanese; everyone else gets JMA's official English. Advisories (注意報) are left out on purpose — they stand over much of the country most days, and Vigilant Ear should only interrupt you for the levels that mean act now.

CANADA — ECCC
Warnings and watches from Environment and Climate Change Canada, in English or French, matched to the alert zone you are standing in rather than a box drawn around the province.

ALSO IN THIS RELEASE
• Weather alerts are matched to the real shape of your region, so a warning meant for the next prefecture over no longer reaches you.
• Alert notifications now lead with the alert itself rather than the issuing agency's acronym, in every language.

Severe-weather alerts are free, and stay free. Each country's feed only runs where it applies, so Japan's warnings stay quiet in Toronto and Canada's stay quiet in Osaka.

As always: listening, captions, and translation run entirely on your device.

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-08-28.*