A little over thirty years ago, when he was in his mid-forties, my friend David Howorth lost all hearing in his left ear, a calamity known as single-sided deafness. "It happened literally overnight," he said. "My doctor told me, 'We really don't understand why.' " At the time, he was working as a litigator in the Portland, Oregon, office of a large law firm. His hearing loss had no impact on his job--"In a courtroom, you can get along fine with one ear"--but other parts of his life were upended. The brain pinpoints sound sources in part by analyzing minute differences between left-ear and right-ear arrival times, the same process that helps bats and owls find prey they can't see.

A person with a disability is defined as a person having an impairment which can be physical, sensory or mental in nature. According to the United Nations as of the year 2021 the world population stands at a whopping 7.9 billion. Out of 7.9 billion people more than 1 billion people have some form of disability which is approximately 15 percent of the total population of the world. Life is hard enough as it is but for people with disabilities there are additional hardships that they have to face every single day. These hardships vary according to the type of disability.

Google's Pixel phones are the company's preferred way of showcasing its AI chops to consumers. Pixel phones consistently set the phone camera bar thanks to Google's AI prowess. But many of the AI features have nothing to do with the camera. The Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL unveiled this week at the Made by Google hardware event in New York City continue this tradition. Camera improvements aside, the Pixel 4 makes a play for a new arena that Google clearly wants to rule: offline natural language processing.

Earlier this year, Google launched Live Transcribe, an Android application that provides real-time automated captions for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Through many months of user testing, we've learned that robustly delivering good captions for long-form conversations isn't so easy, and we want to make it easier for developers to build upon what we've learned. Live Transcribe's speech recognition is provided by Google's state-of-the-art Cloud Speech API, which under most conditions delivers pretty impressive transcript accuracy. However, relying on the cloud introduces several complications--most notably robustness to ever-changing network connections, data costs, and latency. Today, we are sharing our transcription engine with the world so that developers everywhere can build applications with robust transcription. Those who have worked with our Cloud Speech API know that sending infinitely long streams of audio is currently unsupported.

The company hopes doing so will let any developer deliver captions for long-form conversations. The source code is available now on GitHub. Google released Live Transcribe in February. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to turn audio into real-time captions. Unlike Android's upcoming Live Caption feature, Live Transcribe is a full-screen experience, uses your smartphone's microphone (or an external microphone), and relies on the Google Cloud Speech API.

Over the past few years, Google has created multiple applications with accessibility in mind. Yet, most of these apps have focused on users who have physical or visual impairments. Examples include last year's Voice Access and Lookout apps. Now, the company wants to provide better support for users who are deaf or hard of hearing as well. As part of this effort, Google is rolling out two new apps -- Live Transcribe and Sound Amplifier -- starting today.