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There's a lot of good stuff here, but I have to say I'm disappointed that they still haven't added anything along the lines of Android's Live Captions feature a
by shade 5y ago
There's a lot of good stuff here, but I have to say I'm disappointed that they still haven't added anything along the lines of Android's Live Captions feature as a system-wide thing for iOS/macOS.
I generally prefer Apple for their strongly pro-privacy stance, but this is something they're dropping the ball on. After living with this feature in Chrome for a while, it's such a big quality of life improvement that for the first time in years, I'm thinking about jumping to Android even though it would incur some extra costs to do so[1].
I can use Loopback to feed audio into the iOS or web version of Otter.ai on my MBP to fill in some of the gaps where Chrome isn't an option (i.e., FaceTime calls with family and friends), but it increasingly feels like a janky solution and I'd rather have something built in.
[1] - I like having a smartwatch so as not to miss notifications so I'd need to find a good enough solution for that, plus my current hearing aid needs an additional supporting device to stream from an Android phone, so that would run up some additional costs.
- snyp 5y agoDoesn't Voice Over do that?
- chris37879 5y agoNope, voice over does the exact opposite of that, it takes written text and converts it to speech. Live captions take in audio and output text of the speech in that audio.
- joshstrange 5y ago> I can use Loopback to feed audio into the iOS or web version of Otter.ai on my MBP I'm assuming you are doing iOS->macOS(w/loopback)->Otter.ai web right? Or can you have loopback feed into iOS and then use Mobile Safari+Otter.ai? I currently use a similar setup with Loopback and otter.ai to transcribe YouTube live videos and then do manual touch up before release. I never expected that other people were using Loopback+Otter.ai, I figured I was a fringe/edge case, but after some googling it looks like it's far from an obscure solution.
- shade 5y agoSort of, yeah. My personal laptop is an M1 MBP, so I can run the iOS version of Otter on it, have the system default audio point to LoopBack with the headphone jack as a monitor (which goes to a device that streams to my hearing aid). Then in my video conference software I set up the system default audio as the sound output and my Logitech C920 webcam as the microphone input. Conference software gets what I'm saying, Otter gets what everyone else is saying, I get captions. Work is a Windows laptop; I could (and do, on my personal Windows desktop) use VoiceMeeter to accomplish the same general approach as described above. But rather than have my security team at work asking me annoying questions, it's easier to run Otter on my iPad and use a TRS-to-TRRS patch cable (I use the Movo CFP-1 from Amazon) to feed that into my iPad... plus using my iPad to display the captions frees up my displays for meeting-related things. In pre-pandemic times I would also use it for some meetings at work, and meetups. I think Otter has a fairly significant user base of people using it for accessibility and not just meeting notes, and is seemingly aware of it because they've added features geared to that use case, like the full screen text option with adjustable font sizes.
- joshstrange 5y agoVery cool! I didn't even think about running iOS apps on the M1, my brain jumped to a physical iOS device but that makes total sense. It probably solves the annoyance of burning a whole browser (by setting it's mic to the fake input from loopback) when you redirect it to app running on the M1. I have Google Chrome Beta installed as my "Otter.ai client" so that I don't have to mess with it on my main Chrome instance. Thanks for sharing your setup, it's very interesting!