2017 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Wouldn’t it be great if every day life came with subtitles? In order to bring Bett back into the conversation, we invented ‘Spuble’. Spuble uses speech to text technology to create real life speech bubbles. The user talks into the mobile phone or tablet and instantly the words appear on the screen. The user holds the screen up to the hearing impaired person for them to read like live subtitles. Simple! There are so many different ways to communicate using your mobile device – telephone conversation, sms, email, WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Skype, Snapchat etc. With spuble, we created a new way to communicate using such a device in a simple way – to somebody in the same room.

Creative Execution

Spuble was deigned with the knowledge that elderly people such as Bob will be using and navigating it. The UI was designed in such a way that Bob (96) could use it intuitively. The fonts within the app where carefully considered and chosen due to the typographic features which make it easy to read from far away. The bold, contrasting colours where selected to stand out making the speech bubbles easy to read for elderly people. The navigation was kept extremely simple with an option to turn on simple instructions for the user if needed.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

Although Spuble was inspired by and designed for Bett and Bob, we made it free for anybody to download and use. Spuble has been downloaded thousands of times around the world and every month this is increasing, from Australia to France, the UK and Canada. Spuble has also been adopted by O2 UK for specialist visual & hearing impairment training. After receiving such positive feedback from all over the globe, we are planning to make spuble 2.0 available in a number of languages in order to help as many people as possible.

Age-related damage is the single biggest cause of hearing loss. (AoHL, 2011) This means that older people are very likely to experience hearing loss alongside other long-term conditions – such as dementia. Knowing that Bett’s condition of Dementia and hearing loss is becoming increasing common among elderly people we wanted to do something to help her with the aim of helping others too. By observing Bett keep in touch with the world through reading her daily newspapers and the subtitles on TV, we came up with an idea to help her and others like her.