Accessibility shouldn't cost you money or your privacy. Meet Earshot.
I was a PM on Google's Live Transcribe. It never came to iPhone. So I rebuilt it.
🎙️ In 2019, a team of nearly 30 engineers, designers, researchers, and PMs at Google spent nine months building Android Live Transcribe — a free app that captions speech and ambient sound in real time, inspired by a Deaf researcher who just wanted an easier way to talk to his eng team.
It launched at Google I/O, became the most-adopted accessibility app Google ever shipped, and came preloaded on 2 billion Android devices. Today, it has hundreds of millions of active users.
I was one of 2 PMs on it. This past Sunday afternoon, I rebuilt it for iOS. 📱
Google never shipped Live Transcribe for iOS, and the iOS ecosystem never fully-filled the gap. There were and are lookalikes — but none of them are truly free, private, or multilingual. Most charge, upsell, push you into the cloud, or harvest identifiers.
💡 Having a disability shouldn’t be an excuse to charge people or erode their privacy.
So I built Earshot Live Transcription for iOS:
✅ Free — no sign-up, no sign-in, no ads, no upsells.
🔒 Private — everything runs on-device. The only network call is to download and update the local model, OpenAI’s Whisper.
✈️ Offline — works without a Wi-Fi or cellular connection.
🌍 Multilingual — 99 languages, all translatable back into English.
🔊 Ambient-sound aware — recognizes 300 environmental sounds.
Earshot makes one key improvement over most other live transcription apps: all speech transcription is done locally via OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition system. Its accuracy — measured by word error rate (WER) — is an impressive 8.6% for the “small” model (English), though this will be worse for other languages, especially “long tail” ones.
I also ship the tiny and base models, which are blazingly fast and work better on older iPhones. In my testing, they did well on accuracy too.
♿ Accessibility tools shouldn’t themselves be inaccessible. Free should mean free. Private should mean private. That’s the standard the original Live Transcribe set on Android. iOS users deserve the same.
🚀 I’m working with Apple now on getting it approved for general availability, which should happen very soon. If you’d like to join the early-access program to get the latest build and help shape the app, send me an email or DM.
More at www.briankemler.com/earshot