CaptionMe
Break your barriers of communication with CaptionMe.
Summary
Summary of CaptionMe
CaptionMe is a smartphone application that transcribes speech in real-time, so that those who are hard of hearing can easily follow along in conversations.
Some features we provide include continuous closed captioning, multilingual transcriptions, adjustable fonts, and an intuitive UI. This app isn’t restricted to those with a hearing impairment; anyone can use this app and make life more accessible for themselves and those around them who need it.
The Problem
Hearing Impairment
Hearing impairment is a large issue that many people face around the world. This limits people’s ability to participate in social interactions and to understand conversations. This is something that around 5% of the world population goes through every day. That’s close to 466 Million people.
Our Client
Marie-Claire
Our lead user, Marie-Claire, is someone who is hard of hearing, doesn’t know sign language, and uses a hearing implant that provides limited hearing. She has a hard time understanding conversations and often finds this frustrating. Often, she resorts to reading the speaker’s lips, however this becomes very difficult when there are new or multiple people participating in the conversation. She has difficulty communicating well in groups and is constantly missing key information in most of her interactions. We want to break these barriers of hearing impairment in people's everyday lives.
The Competition
Competitive Landscape
Ava is available on iOS and Android and offers similar functionality as we aim to offer, however, their UI could use a lot of improvement, considering some of the main complaints people have is needing to sign in to use it when all they want is to have a conversation with the person in front of them. Other issues include a heavily steep monthly subscription fee of 30$ to use it freely.
Easy Talk Lite is free to use and has a good user interface with multiple languages and a simple user interface that serves the purpose of 1-1 convos. It does however lack group chat functionality which would enable conversations with larger groups.
Live Caption is freemium app that offers a sub-par free app with a poor UI, Ads and limited features, while the premium version is offered at $5 USD a month.
For CaptionMe, we aim to compete and better our competitors with our UI and functionalty. We want customers to use our application with ease and have many features avalible to them. A free application with lots of functionality will help customers in everyday lives.
The Milestones
Milestones
The CaptionMe project was started in the middle of January and we have kept on track to building a useful app that truly satisfies our user's needs. We started with an in depth requirements analysis with in person client interviews to understand the user's need. The first functional prototype of the app was completed end of February. We iteratively developed a solution while working with our client and getting feedback on how to continuosly improve the application. We were able to produce a much more refined version in a month and implement more features such as an extra language. CaptionMe won second place in the Design Day competition for the accessibility category at the University of Ottawa. We hope to keep our momentum in development going as well as growing through various competitions.
The Business
Business Model
How do we create a free app that can sustain itself financially?
CaptionMe can be life changing for those who need it, free of cost. We hope that this can help inspire people to donate to the cause to help make the world a more accessible place. Benefits of being an NPO is that this allows you to get help from organizations to get your organization running. Things like Legal advice, Software Licenses, Servers, and Salaries can all be procured at a lower cost.
The Future
Where CaptionMe is Heading
We plan to add additional features to improve the usability and versitility of CaptionMe. Some features may include group chat functionality, additional languages, UI improvements, and availability on multiple platforms. We will gather funding to help market to users. Also, develop the business model further to create a self sustaining application. We want to help you and those around you to make the world a more accessible place.
CaptionMe Features
Continuous Closed Captioning
Real time speech to text transcription without time limits
Adjustable Font
Accesibility adjustment of font for better readability
Bluetooth Support
Ability to use bluetooth mics for convenience
Multilingual Transcriptions
Transcription in user's language of choice
Intuitive UI
Easy to use interface for anybody
Editable Layout
Customizable layout with night mode and other features
Apple Store
Play StoreThe CaptionMe Team
Meet Our Team
Filip Drobnjakovic
Computer Engineer
Filip has worked five CO-OP work terms in the industry, working on all aspects of software stack. He is experienced with many programming languages and markups including Python, Ruby, Javascript and C#. He has experience integrating data store and notification solutions to web applications, including Minio and Firebase.
Meesam Haider
Computer Engineer
Meesam has experience from four CO-OP placements in a development position creating effective solutions for real customers. His engineering capstone project was a 3D tracking software to validate exercises resulting in a publication. He has experience in developing web and mobile applications using various technologies such as Javascript, Java, C#, Python and more.
Eric Maia
Electrical Engineer
Eric has built a successful capstone project in Pose Measurement Instrumentation for robotics. He had four CO-OP work terms worth of experience, including an automation coop and an innovation employment focusing on user empathy and principles of design. He has experience with Python, Java and C programming, amongst others.
Lucas Poon
Computer Engineer
Lucas has four CO-OP software development work terms with experience in navigation, embedded systems, and agile development. His engineering capstone project was an innovative 3D tracking system for form validation. He has experience programming in Java, Python, C#, and other languages.