Android will welcome a new feature that should make life easier for people who are deaf and hard of hearing. Sound Notification thus makes it possible to signal a particular noise to the user, whether it is a crying baby, a barking dog or a ringing alarm.
Google is working a lot on accessibility features to help people with disabilities. Today, the Mountain View brand introduces the Sound Notifications feature, dedicated to the deaf and hard of hearing in their everyday lives.
This app wants to complement the suite introduced with Instant Transcription. The latter allows you to transcribe a written conversation directly to your phone. Very practical but limited to speaking ... until today. By activating the Sound Notifications option in the settings, the software will detect much more.
A barking dog, a crying baby ...
Thus, when the application is activated, it will alert the user to a loud ambient noise emitted around them. For example, if a baby is crying, a notification will be sent to them. Google promises a multitude of recognized sounds, whether it is a barking dog, a ringing alarm or an open tap.
This feature will be available on Android smartphones, but also on watches with Wear OS. A hearing-impaired user who did not notice that an alarm was sounding nearby will be alerted with a vibration. Likewise, a history of alerts can be viewed, so that you can be sure you haven't missed anything. More so, it will indicate how long such a sound has occurred, to know if an alarm went off for a long time or if the dog annoyed the whole neighborhood by barking for hours.
In total, Google promises a library of thirty recognized sounds and we imagine that this list should grow over time. At this time, Sound Notifications is not yet available within the app. Once this is the case, you will have to go to the Instant Transcription settings and to activate this feature.
A new option that should greatly facilitate the lives of people with disabilities. Long forgotten, they are now fully integrated into the development logic of large tech companies. For example, Microsoft has recently improved the interface elements of Windows 10 to help visually impaired people while browsing.