Fast enough to keep up with a real conversation
Captions appear as people speak, not after they finish. That matters more than it sounds: a transcript that lags by a few seconds leaves you answering the question before last, which is its own kind of exhausting. Hearing Buddy is built to keep pace with overlapping speech, fast talkers, and the sort of room where three people start sentences at once.
It holds up in the places that are hardest to hear in — restaurants, lobbies, classrooms, car journeys — because those are exactly the rooms it was built in. Nothing here was designed in a quiet office and hoped for the best.
Your conversations stay on your phone
Speech recognition runs entirely on your device. Your audio is never uploaded to a transcription service, never stored on someone else's server, and never used to improve a model. A doctor's appointment, a difficult conversation with family, a confidential work call in the next room — none of it goes anywhere.
That also means captions work with no signal at all. On a plane, in a basement, on a hike, in a hospital with dead Wi-Fi: it just runs.
Apple's built-in Live Captions is also processed on-device. We think it's a good feature, and we say so on our comparison pages — privacy here is parity between the two, not a point we'll pretend to win.
The transcript is the part people end up loving
Every session is saved on your phone automatically. You can scroll back through what was said, copy any part of it, and share it — the morning after an appointment, or a week later when you need to check what you agreed to.
Background listening keeps captions running while you use another app, so you can look something up mid-conversation without losing the thread. Text size is adjustable, because a caption you have to squint at is not much of a caption.