Put the phone where the sound is, sit where you like
This is the part people do not expect. Because the phone doing the listening does not have to be the phone you are reading, you can finally separate the two. Set a phone on the lectern and read from the back row. Leave one at the head of the conference table and follow from the far end. Your hearing buddy can park their phone next to whoever is talking while you read from across the room.
For anyone who has spent years choosing seats based on where they can hear, that is a small change with a large effect: you get to sit where you actually want to sit.
More than one microphone, one shared transcript
In a meeting, a class, or a family dinner, more people can turn their own microphones on. Every voice flows into the same transcript, attributed as it goes, so you get one conversation to read instead of several competing streams.
It means the quiet person at the other end of the table is no longer the person you simply miss. Their phone hears them clearly even when your phone does not.
Everyone reads in their own language, free
Each person in a shared session chooses the language they want to read, independently of everyone else. The same conversation can be read in several languages at once — someone reading Spanish, someone reading Japanese, someone reading English, all following the same words as they are spoken.
Inside a shared session this costs nothing, for anyone. We made that call on purpose: a family where people think in different languages should not have to buy their way into the same conversation.
More about live translation → Nothing leaves the room
Sharing works directly between the devices themselves. There is no internet connection involved, no server in the middle, no account to create, and no room code to give out. The captions are passed between the phones present and nowhere else.
Practically, that means it works in the places group captioning usually fails — a church hall with no Wi-Fi, a basement meeting room, a moving car, a campsite. It also means there is no service that could be logging your family dinner, because there is no service.