Live Transcribe & Notification

Live captions for speech and everyday sounds

Live Transcribe & Notification turns spoken conversation into readable text on an Android phone. It is designed primarily for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, but it can also help anyone who needs clearer access to speech in busy, quiet, or shared environments. The app listens through the phone or a connected microphone and displays words as they are spoken.

What it can pick up

• Real-time transcription: Follow conversations on screen instead of relying only on audio.
• Multiple languages: The service supports more than 120 languages and dialects.
• Sound alerts: Get notified about sounds such as smoke alarms, doorbells, and a crying baby.
• Personal terms: Add names or specialist vocabulary so commonly used words are easier to recognise.
• External microphones: Use wired, USB, or Bluetooth audio equipment when the phone microphone is not enough.

Useful in conversations and at home

The interface keeps the transcription prominent, which makes it practical for face-to-face conversations and situations where hearing every word is difficult. Sound notifications add a separate layer of awareness for events that may happen outside the conversation. On supported foldable phones, text can also appear on the outer display, making it easier to share the screen with another person.

Listing details

Research at Google publishes this Communication app under package com.google.audio.hearing.visualization.accessibility.scribe. It has a 3.6 rating from 234,515 reviews and more than 1,000,000,000 installs. Those figures place it among the most widely used tools in its category, while the rating suggests that results may vary with speech, background noise, device hardware, and language.