The Deaf App and HoH App
That Captions the Room

Every ReadTalk app is built on one belief: reading is the most reliable way to understand speech you cannot process by ear. Usually that means a language barrier. You open the ReadTalk app for the language you want it to hear, and live Spanish or French becomes big English text on your screen.

But there is a second group of people living the exact same problem with no language barrier at all. If a parent or grandparent is deaf or hard of hearing, they are missing English the way you might miss Spanish: the words are in the air, and they just cannot get them. The room gets lively, three people talk at once, and they go quiet, smiling at the right moments and laughing a half second late. Roughly one in three adults over 65 has hearing loss, and for adults over 75 it is nearly half.

Translation cannot help them. What they need is a deaf app: one built to caption the room itself.

The HoH app for reading the room

Before there was any ReadTalk, the project behind these apps built RoomTalk, a HoH app made for one specific person: the developer's mother, who is hard of hearing, so she could follow family conversations again. It is the app that taught us everything ReadTalk does today.

RoomTalk captions the room. Set the phone on the table, tap once, and the English conversation around it becomes big text captions: large white letters on a dark screen, sized for aging eyes across a table, not for teenagers texting. The last line holds on screen until someone speaks again, so a slower reader is never rushed. If you have seen ReadTalk hold a translation on screen, you have seen this idea; RoomTalk is where it came from.

And the family resemblance runs all the way down:

• Fully offline. The speech recognition runs on the phone. No wifi, no signal, no problem, and nothing anyone says leaves the device. See how the caption app works for the details.
• Radically simple. One main button. A hard of hearing app a grandparent will not open helps no one.
• No subscription, no account. A one-time $4.99. Buy it once and it is theirs.
• It never speaks. Like every app in this family, it puts words on a screen and stays quiet. Both sides of the table keep their dignity.

Which app does your table need?

The split is clean, and it comes down to one question: which words are being missed?

• The words are in Spanish or French. That is a translation job: ReadTalk Spanish or ReadTalk French. Live speech in their language becomes big English text for you; flip the flag and your English becomes big text in their language.
• The words are in English, and hearing is the barrier. That is a captioning job for a deaf and hard of hearing app: RoomTalk listens to the room and turns the English itself into big readable captions.
• Both, honestly. Plenty of bilingual families have a hard of hearing elder at the same table. The apps share one design language, so learning one means knowing both. Use whichever fits the conversation in front of you.

A practical note for gatherings: put the phone closer to the talkers than to the noise, and set it up before the big day so it feels like furniture instead of a gadget. If the gathering is a milestone birthday, the family that pairs captions with a birth-year gift, like vintage t-shirts from the guest of honor's exact year, covers both the hearing and the celebrating. And if you run a shop or a front counter, the same practical streak behind these apps shows up in Ai for small business tools: technology that quietly removes a barrier instead of adding a gadget.

Why we point our own readers there

Because it is the same mission. ReadTalk turns a foreign language into text you can read; a deaf app turns your own language into text someone you love can read. Sound becomes reading, reading becomes understanding, and nobody gets left out of the conversation they are sitting in. That is the whole project, in both directions.

RoomTalk is a one-time $4.99, on the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad, and available for Android direct from roomtalk.app. If someone at your table has been going quiet, it is the least expensive fix you will ever try.

Frequently asked questions