by Neil Bauman, Ph.D. © May, 2025
A man lamented:
I am hard of hearing and my discrimination is poor. Even with my hearing aids, I often miss much of what people say. Is there any technology available that can help me understand what people are saying in situations where my hearing aids aren’t of much help?
When you have a hearing loss, you perceive speech as softer than it once was as you well know. Since you typically no longer hear the softer sounds you formerly heard, you think people are mumbling all the time. Compounding this, since hearing loss seldom occurs equally across all speech frequencies, to you, speech now sounds distorted. This is one reason why it is difficult for you to understand what people are saying.
Furthermore, even when speech is loud enough for you to hear, there is another monkey wrench in the gear works. You still misunderstand what is being said. This is because you are no longer able to discriminate between similar-sounding words. The result is that some/much/all speech sounds like so much gibberish or a foreign language interspersed with some English words (assuming you are speaking English). Thus, your responses are often “off the wall”. This is another of the realities of having a hearing loss that you have experienced.
Wearing properly-fitted hearing aids can largely solve the problem of speech sounding too soft to understand. When wearing hearing aids, you typically now hear speech at normal or near-normal levels again. Furthermore, since hearing aids can be adjusted to amplify the sound frequencies you have lost while leaving unchanged the ones you still hear reasonably-normally, this reduces much of the distortion you hear. That largely solves the loudness problem of hearing loss. However, as you have discovered, hearing aids cannot fix your discrimination problems. You still misunderstand some/many words.
To make it easy to understand why this occurs, I’ll use an analogy between reading/understanding printed material and hearing/understanding speech.
Let’s say you are trying to read a sign through a store-front window. If the window is sparkling clean both inside and outside, you have no problem reading the words on the sign.
However, if the window is so dirty that you can’t make out most of the letters, you can’t figure out what the sign says. Since you want to know what the sign says, you do what you can to try to make the sign readable. You wipe the glass on your side of the window until it is sparkling clean. To your consternation, you find this doesn’t help much as you realize that the inside of the window is also absolutely filthy. To make matters worse, you don’t have access to the other side of the window in order to clean it. The result is that you still can’t read the sign.
In this analogy, cleaning your side of the window is equivalent to getting and wearing properly-fitted hearing aids. You are discouraged when you realize that your hearing aids don’t really help much in this situation because your hearing aids only have access to external sounds (i.e. the outside of the window).
The problem isn’t with your hearing aids (the glass is sparkling clean on the outside). The real problem is the dirt on the inside of the window. In this analogy, the dirt on the inside of the window represents your damaged auditory processing system to which neither you nor your audiologist have access. This is why, in this case, your hearing aids don’t help you understand speech better.
Your discrimination is still poor and consequently you hear a lot of gibberish instead of clear speech. It becomes obvious to you that in certain listening environments, hearing aids are not the whole answer if you want to communicate effectively. That’s the bad news.
Since neither you nor your hearing aids can “clean” your auditory processing system (it’s permanently damaged), you need another technology that gives you the ability to accurately understand speech in spite of your poor hearing. The good news, to answer your question, is that there is now such technology available. It’s called the Caption Companion.
What Is the Caption Companion?
The Caption Companion consists of wonderfully-accurate, incredibly-fast, real-time speech-to-text captioning software (developed by Premier Visual Voice, LLC) that is housed in a Samsung Galaxy tablet.
The Caption Companion listens to speech for you, captures it via either a built-in microphone or a wireless remote microphone, converts the speech sounds to text and almost-instantly writes the words on the tablet screen so you can easily read them. Thus, it bypasses your “dirty window” problem.
As soon as it came out in 2024, I tried this new Caption Companion. Right at the outset, I must say I was impressed! In more difficult listening environments, my speech discrimination instantly skyrocketed. Now I could understand what people were saying instead of missing most of the conversation.
The Caption Companion’s accuracy is astonishing. In many listening situations, I can now readily understand speech that otherwise was almost impossible for me to understand, in spite of wearing my “fancy-pants” hearing aids (which I love by the way). I think you’ll have the same experience.
Since the Caption Companion is tablet-sized, it is incredibly easy to read, unlike trying to read tiny captions on your cell phone. Its large (9.25” diagonal) screen shows 9 lines of text in landscape mode (15 lines in portrait mode) at my favorite type size (the middle of 5 sizes). This makes reading captions exceptionally easy for old or tired eyes. At this size, you don’t have to squint or hunch over the tablet to try to read the captions. The words are easy to read from 2 to 4 feet away so you can place the Caption Companion on your desk or table in a convenient spot without that affecting readability.
Using this middle-sized text, you get approximately 8 words per line depending on the length of the words. Furthermore, the words don’t scroll up so fast that you can’t read them before they disappear. Thus, you can sit back and relax as you read the captions and actually follow a conversation.
However, if someone is using long words like antidisestablishmentarianism or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (and yes, the Caption Companion even spells these long words correctly) you’ll only get 2 words per line, but who uses such big words in real life?
How Accurate Is the Caption Companion?
Now that you have a portable device that is easy to read, your next issue is accuracy. Is it going to produce a lot of gibberish like your ears are doing or not? Thus you want to know just how accurate is the Caption Companion really is. You may find it hard to believe, but it is as accurate as the best live captioners. It even has the credentials to prove it.
In offline mode (so it can’t get help from any Internet sources) the Caption Companion is the first (and so far the only) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) device to pass the NCSP, a live captioning accuracy exam that only human captioners have thus far been able to pass. The NCSP test is so hard that their website only lists 40 human captioners worldwide that have passed this test. Among this elite list of human captioners proudly sits the Caption Companion, having received its NCSP certification on January 14, 2025.
The NCSP certification is probably the toughest captioning standard on the planet. The NCSP (NER Certified Speech-to-text Provider) test does not just test word-for-word accuracy. It’s a much more rigorous test as it takes into account not only word-for-word accuracy, but also capitalization, punctuation, and meaning. To pass this test, the prospective NCSP captioner must achieve a score of 98% or better.)
Does the Caption Companion achieve this level of accuracy in real life? As a person with a severe hearing loss and poor discrimination like you have, this was something I wanted to check out for myself.
Note: Accuracy depends on the clarity of the speech of the person speaking, the distance the speaker is from the microphone and the amount of background noise/reverberation/etc. the microphone picks up.
In a small room in a relatively-quiet environment, the accuracy using the Caption Companion’s built-in microphone is incredible. However, as the room size increases, the noise level rises or the speaker is some distance from the microphone, the accuracy drops.
The good news is that there is an easy way to largely overcome these problem listening situations. You just whip out the Caption Companion’s “SmartMic” that comes with the Caption Companion. It is an unobtrusive remote microphone about the size of your little finger and clip it to the clothing just below the chin of the person you are trying to hear. Instantly, the accuracy returns.
Thus, in a large room such as a church sanctuary or auditorium, rather than trying to use the built-in microphone on the tablet with maybe 80% accuracy, you use the SmartMic.
To see how accurate it was, I gave my SmartMic to my pastor to wear as a test. The results were impressive. The accuracy was 99.4% when the Caption Companion used a different word than the pastor spoke, or it missed a word. In addition, there were some minor errors that didn’t change the meaning such as where a letter was missing (e.g. “love” instead of “loved”.) Overall, this dragged the accuracy down to 98%—still very impressive accuracy. Another Sunday I repeated the experiment with a similar result—an overall accuracy of 98.6%. Thus, I verified that in real-life situations the Caption Companion was indeed worthy of its NCSP certification.
Note that the SmartMic has an advertised range of 100 feet, so you don’t have to be physically near the person talking as long as he is wearing the SmartMic. This distance varies depending on whether you have a clear line of sight to the SmartMic or whether there are obstructions (walls, windows etc.) between you and the SmartMic.
However, as the distance from the speaker to the microphone increases, accuracy drops due to the fact that higher-frequency sounds “fall out of the air” as the distance increases and thus never reach the microphone. This is not the microphone’s fault. It is just the laws of physics in action.
I compared the results when I kept the remote microphone with me (about 20 or 25 feet from the pastor and also about the same distance from the church public address loudspeakers. As I expected, the accuracy went down—in this case to 91.6%. (This is the same accuracy I got when plugging the Caption Companion into an FM receiver receiving the sermon through the church FM system.)
Typical mistakes were where somewhat-similar-sounding words become confused such that the Captioning Companion recorded “the plague” as “the plane”; “hardened” became “heart and”; “wreak” became “reach”; “judge him for” became “just before”; the plural “s” was dropped several times and so on. Thus, you can see that it is important to keep the SmartMic as close to the speaker’s lips as is practical if you want highly-accurate results.
Incidentally, the software of the Caption Companion is designed such that it largely ignores other voices in the background. For example, in a restaurant, I can place it on the table in front of me and read the captions of my wife or other person sitting opposite me without it picking up all the other chatter around me. And when a waitress comes by, it picks up her voice beautifully. In one restaurant, the waitress saw her questions to me magically and instantly appearing on the Caption Companion’s screen. She was intrigued that there was such a device to help hard of hearing people and exclaimed, “What will they think of next!”
If there is no background noise or reverberation in the room, the results from just using the built-in microphone can be impressive. In quiet, even if the person you are talking to is speaking quietly, and they are across your living room, accuracy is still close to 100%. And you don’t even have to be in the same room. For example, if I have the Caption Companion running and sitting on my desk in my home office and I go into the living room to talk with my wife, when I come back there is what I said on the Caption Companion’s screen, albeit not quite as accurate as it would be if I were talking in the same room as the Caption Companion.
The Caption Companion Is a Speed Demon
Captioning via the Caption Companion is incredibly fast—there is almost no delay from the time the speaker says a word until you can read that same word on the screen. Of all the captioning devices I’ve used, the Caption Companion is definitely the fastest.
The Caption Companion Probably Understands Your Language
Not only does the Caption Companion understand American English, but it also understands 80 other languages and dialects. Eighteen of these languages/dialects are built in so they can be used when the Caption Companion is off-line. The rest of them only work when the Caption Companion is connected to the Internet.
You can choose two primary languages that you can switch between at the press of a finger (for example, English and Spanish) and to change to the other 16 languages you need to go to the menu to change them.
Note that the Caption Companion only converts speech to text in whatever language you are using. It does not translate from one language to another (nice as that would be).
Save or Delete the Transcribed Text as You Will
You can delete any conversation at any time with just a couple of strokes. Thus, if you are having a confidential conversation and you don’t want to risk anyone else seeing it, you can delete it at any time with just a couple of strokes. Conversely, you can save any conversation to your computer if you want to preserve it and/or print it out—for example, the instructions your doctor gave you.
The Caption Companion by default automatically erases any transcribed text after 24 hours for privacy reasons. However, you can change the default to 3 days if you so desire. This is useful if you are away from home for a couple of days yet want to save or print the transcribed text when you get home.
Built-in Sound Meter
A cool feature is that the Caption Companion has a built-in “sound meter” so you can see whether there are any sounds around you. This “meter” is located in the top right corner of the screen and is composed of two quarter circles. The inner quarter is dark blue and shows the level of the background sounds around you—the louder the sounds the bigger the quarter circle gets.
A light blue quarter circle that extends from the outside of the dark blue quarter circle shows the speech volume. The louder the speech, the further the light blue quarter circle extends. This way you are always aware of the level of the background sound and the speech level if someone is talking.
If the light blue quarter circle is at least the same width as the background sound the accuracy of captioning is wonderful, but as the speech level drops and the background sound level increases so that there is only a small speech rim showing, as you would expect, the accuracy drops and you know you have to move closer or have the speaker us your SmartMic.
Display Captions at a Meeting
You can also use the Caption Companion to mirror the Caption Companion’s screen via a computer to a large monitor or on a screen or wall via a projector so all present can read it. This is really useful if you are attending a meeting for hard of hearing people such as at HLAA (Hearing Loss Association of America) meetings.
In addition to all the above features, the Caption Companion has a number of other cool features that you can explore for yourself if/when you got one.
Where Can I Find More Information or Get One for Myself?
The main Caption Companion website is here.
Note that using the Caption Companion is not always intuitive, but the very-readable manual shows you step by step how to access and use each of its features. Also, there are a series of 12 short videos available that guide you step-by-step if you want to view them rather than read the manual.
You can access the manual and videos at Caption Companion Support, and of course, these videos are all captioned so you can “hear” them.
To get the Caption Companion for yourself, you can order it from Diglo (formerly Harris Communications).
The Caption Companion is not cheap at $1,599.00, but, as they say, you get what you pay for. Thus, if you want a portable device with incredibly fast, accurate speech-to-text transcription (along with all its other cool features), the Caption Companion is hard to beat. I definitely love mine!
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