A call captioning system for captioning a hearing user's (HU's) voice signal during an ongoing call with an assisted user (AU) includes: an AU communication device with a display screen and a caption service activation feature, and a first processor programmed to, during an ongoing call, receive the HU's voice signal. Prior to activating the caption service via the activation feature, the processor uses an automated speech recognition (ASR) engine to generate HU voice signal captions, detect errors in the HU voice signal captions, use the errors to train the ASR software to the HU's voice signal to increase accuracy of the HU captions generated by the ASR engine; and store the trained ASR engine for subsequent use. Upon activating the caption service during the ongoing call, the processor uses the trained ASR engine to generate HU voice signal captions and present them to the AU via the display screen.

Aspects of the present disclosure relate to systems and methods that aid users with hearing and/or speech impediments to have a conversation with a remote phone number without human assistance. In one aspect, an application residing on a user's device, such as a smartphone, tablet computer, laptop, etc., may be used to initiate a phone call to a recipient. Upon initiating the phone call locally, a service residing on the server may receive a request to initiate a connection to the recipient. Once the recipient answers, the user may converse with the recipient by providing text input to their local app. The text input may be transmitted to the service. The service may use a text to speech converter to translate the received text to speech that can be delivered to the recipient.

A telephone system is described herein, wherein the telephone system is configured to assist a hearing-impaired person with telephone communications as well as face-to-face conversations. In telephone communication sessions, the telephone system is configured to audibly emit spoken utterances while simultaneously depicting a transcription of the spoken utterances on a display. When the telephone system is not employed in a telephone communication session, the telephone system is configured to display transcriptions of spoken utterances of people who are in proximity to the telephone system.

A conferencing system terminal device includes a display, an audio output, a user interface, a communication device, and one or more processors. The one or more processors present an audio difficulties user actuation target upon the display during an audio or video conference occurring across a network and concurrently with a presentation of conference content. Actuation of the audio difficulties user actuation target indicates that audio content associated with the audio or video conference being delivered by the audio output is impaired.

A system for centralized captioned telephone service (“C-CTS”), which includes a C-CTS system (“C-CTSS”) for providing a transcription service to a user subscribed to the C-CTS during a phone call with a peer; a mobile communications device of the user which includes a first phone number assigned from a carrier of the user; a communications device of the peer which includes a second phone number; and a plurality of caption providers that communicate with the C-CTSS. The first phone number is associated with the C-CTSS and each of the caption providers provides a captioned telephone service. A carrier of the first phone number includes a voice network, a data network, and a database that stores the first phone number of the user which is subscribed to the C-CTS. The C-CTSS includes a database that stores the first phone number of the user.

A system and method for facilitating communication between an assisted user (AU) and a hearing user (HU) includes receiving an HU voice signal as the AU and HU participate in a call using AU and HU communication devices, transcribing HU voice signal segments into verbatim caption segments, processing each verbatim caption segment to identify an intended communication (IC) intended by the HU upon uttering an associated one of the HU voice signal segments, for at least a portion of the HU voice signal segments (i) using an associated IC to generate an enhanced caption different than the associated verbatim caption, (ii) for each of a first subset of the HU voice signal segments, presenting the verbatim captions via the AU communication device display for consumption, and (iii) for each of a second subset of the HU voice signal segments, presenting enhanced captions via the AU communication device display for consumption.

A method for maintaining contact information in a hearing impaired assisted user's communication device includes the steps of (a) providing a web site for altering assisted user contact information, (b) linking a proxy device to the web site, (c) receiving an identifier associated with the assisted user's device via the proxy device, (d) identifying an assisted user's device via the received identifier, (e) enabling the proxy device to be used to modify contact information for the assisted user associated with the received identifier, (f) starting a timer to time out a sync timeout period, (g) during the sync timeout period, receiving an indication via the assisted user's device confirming a desire to update the assisted user's contact information, (h) updating the assisted user's contact information, and (i) at the end of the timeout period, ceasing an indication that updated data is ready to be used from the assisted user's device.

A telecommunications network for playing an enhanced announcement in the same format as that of an enhanced call is described herein. An enhanced call is a call via real time text or video. The telecommunications network includes a node or subsystem, such as an IP multimedia subsystem core (IMS or IMS core), programmed to receive an enhanced call in a text or video format, detect the format of the enhanced call, and return an enhanced announcement—an announcement provided in the same format as the enhanced call. The IMS core can include one or more sub-nodes or sub-components, including a telephony application server (TAS), a media resource function (MRF), or both.

Embodiments of the present invention are directed to a method and system for providing a visual indication that a video relay service (VRS) call originates from an inmate at a corrections facility, in which the method includes initiating a video relay service (VRS) call from a corrections facility between a called party and an inmate incarcerated at the corrections facility; and displaying a visual indication on a VRS client used by the called party, the visual indication including at least one of a visual indication that the VRS call is originating from a corrections facility, a visual indication that the VRS call is from an inmate incarcerated at a corrections facility, and a visual indication that the VRS call is being recorded.

A system and method for use with an assisted user's communication device that includes a display. The method includes providing a user communication device including a processor that is programmed to perform the step of, upon disconnection of an emergency call to a hearing user in which a captioning service has provided text transcription of voice messages from the hearing user, maintaining a link to the captioning service for a predetermined period of time. The processor also is programmed to perform the step of recognizing the call as an emergency call upon placement of the call, and the captioning service is automatically initiated upon the processor performing that recognition.