A communication system and method usable to facilitate communication between a hearing user and an assisted user. In particular, the system employs a wireless portable tablet or other portable electronic computing device linked to a captioning enabled phone as a remote interface for that phone, thereby providing an assisted user with more options, more freedom, and improved usability of the system.

Among other things, a received inbound message is presented to a person wearing a wearable device. The inbound message is presented to the person as perceptible stimulation at the skin of the person. Monitoring is done for presence of an outbound message derived from biopotential signals sensed at the skin of the person after the receipt of the inbound message.

Systems and methods for controlling hearing devices are disclosed. Each hearing device is worn by a user, the hearing devices being communicatively interconnected with each other for data exchange to form a hearing device system. A method includes acquiring a sound signal of each user with a microphone of the hearing device of the user; determining from the sound signal a speaker signal, which indicates, whether the user is a speaking user; determining a priority score for each user from the speaker signal of the user; outputting sound signals from speaking users to the users via the hearing devices of the users, such that sound signals from speaking users with a priority score smaller than a threshold are muted.

A captioning relay for captioning hearing user (HU) voice signals comprising a plurality of separate captioning resources and a captioning administrator module that receives HU voice signal segments corresponding to a plurality of separate ongoing calls between HUs and AUs and provides the voice signal segments in a first in, first out order to the captioning resources, the administrator module providing each voice signal segment from each call to any one of the captioning resources to be captioned without regard to which captioning resource captioned prior voice signal segments generated during the call and, the administrator module further receiving caption segments back from the captioning resources and providing those captioning segments to AU devices associated with the calls that generated corresponding HU voice signal segments, and wherein the number of captioning resources is less than the number of ongoing calls.

A method of operating a captioned telephone call in which an assisted user's (AU's) captioned device is connected by a first line to a hearing user's (HU's) device and by a second line to a relay providing captioning for a conversation is disclosed. The method includes capturing an AU's voice signal via a microphone, transmitting the voice signal from the captioned device to the HU's device on the first line, obtaining a combined voice signal including both users' voice signals from the first line at the captioned device, cancelling the AU's voice signal from the combined signal to generate an independent HU voice signal, broadcasting the HU's voice signal via a speaker, transmitting the independent HU's voice signal to the relay, receiving captions at the captioned device from the relay corresponding to the HU's voice signal, and presenting the captions as text on a display screen.

According to one or more aspects of the present disclosure, operations related to selecting a transcription generation technique may be disclosed. In some embodiments, the operations may include obtaining multiple user ratings that each correspond to a different one of multiple transcriptions. Each transcription may be obtained using a first transcription generation technique and may correspond to a different one of multiple communication sessions. The operations may further include selecting, for a subsequent communication session that occurs after the multiple communication sessions, a second transcription generation technique based on the user ratings. In addition, the operations may include providing the subsequent transcription to a device during the subsequent communication session.

A system is provided that includes a first network interface for a first network type and a second network interface for a second network type that is different from the first network type. The system also includes at least one processor configured to cause the system to perform operations. The operations may include obtaining, from the first network interface, audio from a communication session with a remote device established over the first network and obtaining an indication of a communication device available to participate in the communication session and direct audio obtained from the communication session to a remote transcription system. The operations may also include directing the audio to the second network interface for transmission to the communication device, obtaining transcript data from the remote transcription system based on the audio, and directing the transcript data to the second network interface for transmission to the communication device.

A method to transcribe communications includes the steps of obtaining a plurality of hypothesis transcriptions of a voice signal generated by a speech recognition system, determining consistent words that are included in at least first and second of the plurality of hypothesis transcriptions, in response to determining the consistent words, providing the consistent words to a device for presentation of the consistent words to an assisted user, and presenting the consistent words via a display screen on the device, wherein a rate of the presentation of the words on the display screen is variable.

System and method for processing and presenting a conversation. For example, a system includes a sensor configured to capture an audio-form conversation, and a processor configured to automatically transform the audio-form conversation into a transformed conversation. The transformed conversation includes a synchronized text, and the synchronized text is synchronized with the audio-form conversation. Additionally, the system includes a presenter configured to present the transformed conversation including the synchronized text and the audio-form conversation.

Internet Protocol captioned telephone service often utilizing Automated Speech Recognition has the capability of transcribing both sides of a conversation and displaying them in a segregated manner at the election of the user. A link may be sent by the user to a far end caller so the far end caller may view the transcribed text.