Earshot Live Transcription vs Simul

Earshot is real-time, on-device captioning for iPhone - for conversations, lectures, doctor visits, anywhere you want to read what's being said. It's a free app that captions speech and ambient sound in real time, inspired by a Deaf researcher who'd spent his career on captioning. Having a disability shouldn't cost you money or your privacy. So I built Earshot. • Free — no sign-up, no sign-in, no ads, no upsells. • Private — everything runs on your device. The only network call is to download or update the local speech model so conversations never go to the cloud. • Offline — works with no Wi-Fi or cellular connection. • Multilingual — 99 languages, and it can translate any of them into English. • Ambient-sound aware — recognizes hundreds of environmental sounds, with full-screen alerts for urgent ones: smoke alarm, carbon monoxide, doorbell, crying baby, phone ringing, sirens. Accessibility tools shouldn't themselves be inaccessible. Free should mean free. Private should mean private. WHAT IT DOES • Real-time captions in a clean, focused screen, plus a chat-style "feed" layout. Tap the cog for text size, vibration, and ambient-sound options. • Translate non-English speech to English on the fly. • Full-screen urgent-sound alerts with strong haptics; ambient-sound tags shown in the corner when you want them. • Save transcripts on your device as readable documents. Star the ones to keep, filter by 1:1 or group, by alerts, by starred. • Share any transcript as plain text — it never leaves your device unless you send it. WHO IT'S FOR Built for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community as a private alternative to cloud captioning. Also useful in loud environments, for language learners, and for anyone who wants to read or save what was said. PRIVACY Audio never leaves your device. No accounts, no analytics, no ads, no tracking. The AI model downloads once on first launch (~244 MB) — the only network request the app makes. Full policy at briankemler.github.io/LiveTranscribe/privacy. REQUIREMENTS iPhone on iOS 17 or later. Works offline after the one-time model download. CONTACT brian.kemler@gmail.com

When you can't follow, just put your phone down. Simul turns what you hear into bilingual captions in real time: the original on top, the translation below, sentence by sentence as they're spoken. ■ Entirely on this device Recognition and translation both run locally. Audio and text are never uploaded and never touch a server. It works in Airplane Mode — go ahead and turn off your network right now and try it. ■ Where it helps · Face to face: one conversation, every turn translated — whoever speaks is detected automatically. If it picks the wrong side, tap that half to switch it. Lay the phone flat between you and one tap splits the screen so their half reads right way up · Lectures and meetings: set it on the table and follow the speaker line by line · Video: play a foreign-language video out loud and read along on screen ■ Built to be read Pure black, large type. The sentence still being spoken is dimmed and underlined; it settles once it's finished — so you always know which line can still change. Show both languages or just the translation. Caption size adjusts on its own, without changing your system text size. ■ Apple Watch Read captions right on your wrist, and start or stop from there. Put the phone down without missing anything. ■ Also · Speak the translation aloud so the other person can hear it · Generate a summary of the conversation when you're done · A Home Screen widget showing your current language pair — one tap to start · Start from Control Center, the Action button, or Siri · Continue on another device with Handoff ■ Language models download first The first time you use it, Simul walks you through downloading the recognition model for your languages. Models are managed by the system and shared across apps, so they don't count toward Simul's size. Downloading needs a network connection — after that, you never need one again.