I have a wonderful older lady who is very hard of hearing. Even when she has her hearing aid in it is a significant struggle to successfully communicate with her. This results in her oftentimes being isolated from conversations - even though it is evident that she would love to be a part of them.

    I am wondering if such a device as I am about to describe already exists. If it does, I would love to hear about it, as I am interested in purchasing one for her. If not, I hope someone will read this post and consider it a worthwhile task.

    I am thinking of a small device - perhaps the size of a cell phone, pocket calculator, etc. that would be able to "listen" to audio occurring on the fly and create a text translation of it, preferably with some capability to distinguish between multiple voices - otherwise if there are more than two people in the conversation it would become extremely confusing.

    I know the technology for this already exists. We already have technologies such as Closed Captioning (CC) that provides translation of television shows, applications for our computers that allow us to speak and have the words typed in our word processor, and applications that will translate our voice mail messages into text messages or emails and send them to us.

    It seems like a pretty simple device that would use basic technology but could greatly enhance conversation for the elderly who are hard of hearing and for whom even hearing aids seem to have little effect.

   A device similar to what I am speaking of is iCommunicator. But this device requires too many parts (a headset for a single speaker, a wireless receiver, and a computer to run the software). All this needs to be consolidated into one commodity (e.g. $199) device. Robert Scoble has written about a software application for cell phones that might be a partial solution for this issue. Personal Captioning Systems, Inc. has some software that appears to be heading in this way, but the site is somewhat scant on details and examples.