Premise
Imagine you miss a flight announcement because it was only made over loudspeaker intercom. Or you’re at a train station and they announce that they changed your train’s platform but you didn’t hear it. Often times, a screen is not available and/or not updated in time because people assume everyone heard the announcements.
Proposal
I am proposing a program that uses the built in mic in your phone, laptop, watch or any smart device with a microphone to do two things:
- Recognize when an announcement is happening by letting the user know there’s a loud sound.
- Use speech recognition to translate what is being said onto your screen.
Proof Of Concept
The program starts off by showing the volume levels as a ball moving up and down the screen. If the volume surpasses a threshold, the screen turns red to alert the user. The user can then prompt the speech recognition by touching the screen. Then, when you touch the screen, or click your mouse, the speech recognition clears and starts over.
For some reason I could not get the entire code to work in one browser. The speech recognition would only work on chrome, meanwhile the volume would work on any other browser, but chrome. I think the reason for this is the high security and blocking of certain information access that chrome has built in, and I was unable to figure out how to surpass that. If you have any ideas please leave a comment… my code and the libraries I used can be found in the zip file below.