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
Using a technology that’s been around for a while but in a completely innovative way we created a unique product, which solved a 10 year old problem for Bett and Bob.
The app was designed to be used by Bob who is 96 years old and had previously never used a mobile device. We purposefully kept the interaction as simple as possible. Spuble works by recording spoken words, which are then sent via the internet to a speech recognition server where the sound is interpreted and sent back to the device instantly in the form of text.
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.
Mobile phones and tablets allow people to communicate to each other on opposite sides of the world. Using a mobile phone/tablet, we managed to enable a 2 way conversation for the first time in 10 years between a husband and wife who have been married for 70 years.