DEVELOPER SPOTLIGHT
Captions for Your Phone Calls
Rogervoice - Call Captions
Phone call live transcriptions
‣ Company: RogerVoice
‣ Founder: Olivier Jeannel
‣ Mission: To help those with hearing loss have phone conversations
‣ App launched: 2014
‣ Team size: 50+
‣ Most-used emoji: 🤟
When he set out to create Rogervoice, a free app that transcribes phone calls in real time as you’re talking, Olivier Jeannel had one very important rule.
“It had to be cool,” says Jeannel. “I was tired of disability technology looking so medical. Prescription glasses are made by talented designers; I wanted the same for disability apps.”
Rogervoice is definitely cool. The app, which Jeannel built with cocreator Bastien Le Rest, can now transcribe in over 125 languages; with 50,000 people who have an average of six contacts each, it’s growing by the day.
“People aren’t yet used to the notion that captioning is now possible on phone calls,” says Jeannel. “My ambition is to get to the point where the average Jane is no more surprised at captions on the phone than they are at captions on TV.”
We caught up with Jeannel to discuss eureka moments, changing perceptions, and his company’s “wall of love.”
What inspired you to create Rogervoice?
In 2011 a friend showed me how he used Siri to dictate a note. That got me thinking: “If smartphones are becoming ubiquitous, and they all come with voice assistants…of course!” But it wasn’t about simply captioning calls—it was about doing so with the lowest possible barriers. It had to work instantly, anyplace. It also needed to be affordable, if not free—because why should deaf and hard-of-hearing people pay more than anyone else?
How has Rogervoice grown?
Slowly! It takes time for perceptions to change: It took me a year to get used to phoning with Rogervoice, and I created it! My entourage wasn’t used to calling me either, especially after years of me telling them, “Send me a text or email!” Today more than 4 million minutes of calls have been logged with the app.
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced?
Figuring out how to deliver the speech-to-text blazingly fast. And we had to lower user friction—we wanted people to do nothing more than make a normal phone call. We solved both of these challenges by custom-building our own technology and focusing on UX design.
What’s next for the app?
We’re working on detecting different emotions in voices and displaying them onscreen through emoji. When someone says “I’m fine” with a sad or dismissive voice, it’s not the same as when someone says “I’m fine” with an enthusiastic tone.
What’s the most meaningful feedback you’ve received?
We have a #walloflove on our company Slack with feedback from users, and it’s fed almost daily. We have users that depend on Rogervoice for their jobs: nurses, practitioners, shop owners, restaurateurs. A person in South Africa regularly calls his wife; a grandson in Mexico City installed it on his abuelo’s <grandfather’s> iPhone. It’s the everyday that makes a difference. Dialing that local pizza place or calling your mother is something that can now almost be taken for granted—and that for us is true joy and the real measure of success.
RogerVoice is a part of the App Store Small Business Program. If you are a developer and would like to learn more, follow the link below.