My Grandma is slowly losing her hearing - one ear is 100% deaf while her other remaining one is at about 50%. She uses a CapTel speech to text phone with a huge display to understand what is said when people call her. It generally works well, but she only has one in her family room. She struggles to hear especially when there are multiple people speaking and there is background noise. I've learned techniques to improve her comprehension, but it can only go so far (If interested, here's a few: make sure you're looking at them when talking, speak in a 'deeper tone', don't rush your words, continually repeat what was said until they understand, etc).
Almost everyone in the United States has a phone. If I could download an app that runs this program along with my cousins, and have my Grandma use her 'iPad' (Nook tablet) to understand, with the assistance of something like Transcense, that would be amazing. By linking several microphones, they may be able to cancel out background noise and only highlight the specific speaker, and that would be a fantastic advance.
I'm wondering what their current state of Transcense's speech recognition is, however. From the video, it did see like there were some errors. I'm sure a deaf user can understand what was meant to be said using context of the conversation, but in a business meeting a misunderstood word can change the whole meaning of the sentence or message. I've used Siri, Dragon Naturally speaking, et al and while they're good, they're not perfect. Dragon in particular supposedly can be taught and learn the user's unique style of speech, so I'm also curious if Transcence will be going the route of machine learning and NLP.