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Comment by meibo | Hacker News Reader

For everyone on Android: a lot of Android phones have an auto-subtitling feature now that you can turn on by tapping the volume buttons, and pressing the captions icon. Works great for things like this, apparently it's what they built it for.

https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/9350...

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Unfortunately English only...

I use https://t.me/transcriber_bot god knows what they do with my personal stuff though...

The help post I linked states that it supports English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, & Spanish on Pixel 6+.

I'm on an OnePlus and I've not had it show anything but English correctly, so yeah, it's probably not enabled for other OEMs. Maybe they use their special AI hardware for it on Pixel?

It does say though that the detection is completely on device and none of the data is sent to Google, which is nice - maybe Telegram can add a feature like this, with some of the recent open source models that can run on embedded devices.

Appears to be open source: https://github.com/charslab/TranscriberBot

They use wit.ai for the actual transcription, which belongs to Meta (i.e. Facebook).

So, does that mean the answer is "use it and sell it at will"?

TIL, thanks for sharing! My phone is not supported (Fairphone 3+), sadly.

While such a feature would definitely help with the transcription of a message, unless the transcribed text is stored within the app it would not help with searching the messages.

I use an older version of Android so I don't have this feature.. but you can still work around it by using live transcribe or otter.ai instead, if it plays through the speakers it will be heard (they will not work with headphones connected). These machine-based apps are a blessing because previously, it was necessary to ask someone else to tell you what the message said, whether a relay operator or in person. They're certainly good enough to let you know instantly whether it's spam, a wrong number or something important.

And iOS 16 will also have this feature coming this fall, can be linked to a triple-click of the side button

TIL, never knew what that button is for, thank you!

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