Simple Captions vs OndaHear

Never miss a word. Simple Captions makes conversations easier to follow with real-time captions you can read at a glance. With Simple Captions, you can follow conversations in real time at home, in meetings, or anywhere people are talking. Just open the app, tap to listen, and see spoken words appear clearly on your screen. Designed with simplicity and accessibility in mind, Simple Captions makes communication easier for people with hearing loss or anyone who benefits from visual text support. Key Features: Real-time captions – Instantly see speech converted to text as it’s spoken. Easy to read – Large, high-contrast captions designed for comfort and clarity. Fast and accurate – Uses advanced speech recognition for reliable results. Simple to use – One-tap start for quick access during conversations. Accessibility-focused – Built to support clearer communication in daily life. Stay connected, confident, and part of every conversation with Simple Captions.

OndaHear is a hearing assistant that runs inside your iPhone. Hear the person you came to hear, read what you miss, and keep the conversation afterwards. Nothing you say is uploaded. Listen mode amplifies the voices around you in real time with live captions on screen. Lift soft voices, hold back background noise, and read what is being said as it happens. Live translation works across 19 languages. Speak in one and read or hear it in yours straight away. It all happens on the phone, and it keeps working offline once a language is downloaded. Conversation mode pairs two phones so each person speaks their own language and reads the other side translated live. Text chat writes your message and speaks it aloud on the other phone, already translated, for the times when speaking is not an option. The built-in hearing test is a six frequency audiogram. It gives you a hearing profile, and the app shapes the sound to your own results rather than simply turning everything up. On Apple Watch you can read captions on your wrist and start, stop or boost from there without reaching for your phone. An external microphone is the biggest single upgrade. Captions are only as good as the audio reaching them, so clip a small wireless mic on the person you are talking to, or set one beside the television, and keep the phone with you. Voices arrive clean instead of competing with the room. The Hardware Guide inside the app lists microphones tested with OndaHear. Privacy is not a setting here, it is how the app is built. Speech recognition, translation and audio processing all run on your iPhone using Apple's on-device frameworks, and the app works in airplane mode. No audio is recorded, transmitted or stored on a server. There are no analytics, no ads and no tracking. There is no account to create, and saved transcripts stay on your device. For sound you can adjust compression, a noise gate and voice enhancement, a three band equalizer, automatic gain control, a de-esser and a limiter, and you can save your own presets. You get 15 minutes a day free, every day, with no account and no card. A subscription removes the daily limit and adds the hearing test, custom hearing profiles, the six band equalizer, unlimited transcripts, PDF export and the premium voice processing modes. The price for your country is shown in the App Store before you commit to anything. Earbuds, wired headphones or hearing aids that take sound from your phone are strongly recommended, as they stop the microphone picking up its own output. USB-C and wireless microphones are supported. OndaHear does Listen, Transmit, Conversation, Translation and Text Chat, with live captions, sound amplification, the Hearing Test, an equalizer, Apple Watch and captions in AR glasses. It is not a medical hearing aid. Visit OndaHear.com for the full guide and what's new. Terms of Use: https://ondahear.com/terms.html