Speaker 1: Hi guys, my name is Alyssa, I'm hard of hearing, and today I'll be showing you how to use the EnoCaption app to caption your phone calls. What is EnoCaption? EnoCaption is a mobile app that provides real-time captions for phone calls for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. Also, the app is free for those who are deaf or hard of hearing in the U.S. because the app is certified by the FCC. We love accessibility, baby. So the EnoCaption app lives on my iPhone and my iPad, and I can also view the captions on my laptop for a desktop view. It's also available for Android users on their tablets as well. So, getting started with EnoCaption is actually super easy. First, you're just going to download the app, then you're going to register your account, then you're going to activate your account, then you're going to make a phone call. Easy, breezy, beautiful. There are two ways you can access captions on the EnoCaption app. Number one is through a live stenographer, and these live stenographers have years of specialized training through court reporting schools, which is pretty freaking rad. And the second way is ASR, which is automatic speech recognition. And you can switch caption modes before you start your phone call or during a phone call. So now that we've downloaded the app, let's just walk through the app. Let's take a tour. Let's see all of the options available to us. Let's explore, shall we? Okay, so this is a home screen from my iPhone view. We're going to click the button at the top to select our caption mode. We have ASR, ASR Spanish, cart priority, which means you prefer live stenographer, but you're okay with ASR, and then cart only, which means you only want to use the live stenographer. And sometimes it means you have to wait. Okay, so which one do I like better, the live stenographer option or the ASR option? I actually use both, and it totally just depends on what kind of phone call I'm making and who I'm talking to on that phone call. So the great thing about live stenographers is that they are able to interpret words a little bit better than a computer when it comes to talking to someone who may be in a noisy environment or someone who may have, like, a heavy accent that may be hard for a computer to understand, right? So, like, when I call my hairdresser or when my hairdresser calls me to reschedule an appointment, sometimes when she's on the phone, there are blow dryers going off. It is loud in there, and ASR may get kind of wonky and may not actually understand the words as clearly as a live stenographer would. When I call my friends, I really like to use ASR only because I don't feel the need to use a live stenographer. I usually know their voice pretty well. Even if I don't hear every word they're saying, I'm usually, like, putting the words together, forming a story in my head, and I know their communication style. And so I just feel like the ASR works. Also, it's important to know that all 911 calls are handled by live stenographers for the utmost accuracy and communication. Okay, so now I'm going to show you where to find your EnoCaption personal number on the app and how you can set up call forwarding so that when people call your own personal phone number, it'll be forwarded to the EnoCaption app, and you'll be set up for captions from the start. So from the home screen, we're going to click settings, and then we're going to click our profile at the top, and here we can see your own personal cell phone and your EnoCaption number. If you're not going to use call forwarding, then this is a phone number that you can give to people who you know you will need captions on for when they call you. So, like, I give my EnoCaption phone number to my doctor's office, to my hairdressers, anybody that's potentially going to call me and going to leave me a voicemail about changing or scheduling important events. To set up call forwarding, you're going to click EnoCaption features, and then you're going to click the inbound call number. And then you're going to choose set up call forwarding. Here are the setup instructions, but basically you just click continue, and then you click the mobile number, and then voila, you're done. And then you click dismiss, and we're moving on to the next section. Okay, one of my favorite new features they have is the text-to-speech feature, and that's because sometimes the person on the other line can't understand me, and that can be the most frustrating thing in the world. So this feature allows you to text a response, and it'll convert it to speech so that the other person can maybe understand you a little bit better, and I just, I love that. Okay, so we're still in the EnoCaption features tab. We're going to click text-to-speech, and then we're going to click enable. And then from here, you can choose the voice type. I usually go for female mid-pitch. And we're all done. Back to the home screen, now let's play with the appearance of our captions. So we have the light theme, the dark theme, and we can click caption screen to also play with how we view our captions. So here's where it gets fun. You get to pick whatever color background you want, whatever may be easiest for you to read off of. And then we can also change our text. We have bold text, we have serif font, and dyslexic font. We can also change the size of our captions by scrolling down here at the bottom, or you can change the caption size by taking your two fingers and pinching in and out during a phone call. Cool, huh? Back to the home screen, now let's explore the support tab. So they make it super easy to contact their customer support team through email or text, and you can even make a test call to get comfortable before you make a real phone call on the app. Okay, now let's get to my favorite part, making a phone call. I'm actually going to use my iPad to make a phone call today. Alright, the phone is ringing, and as you can see at the top, I've got ASR selected, and we're officially connected. So now he's going to start speaking, I'm on ASR mode. So this is what the ASR kind of looks like, it's just guessing as he's talking. And then if I want to switch modes, I'm going to click this button down here, and I'm going to click CART English. And now the conversation is being listened to by a live stenographer, and as you can see, they're actually typing a little bit faster than ASR. Another feature I really want to talk about is the EnoCaption Desk View. So this allows you to really immerse yourself in a phone call, so you can now just log on to the EnoCaption website, log in, start a call, join a conference call right from your computer, and you can see everybody's words coming through. So that's a really cool feature, I think. Let's talk about privacy. EnoCaption is regulated and audited by the FCC. All their stenographers are highly trained, who undergo background checks and compliance training. And the captioners only listen to one side, they're not listening to the users of the app. So they're only getting one half of the dialogue. And nothing is saved. So the ASR engine does not log any audio recordings, it doesn't save the transcripts, all of that is gone as soon as the phone call is over. All right, so we all know that even with the best technology, there are still some glitches every now and then. And that's okay. I'm going to leave a link to their help page and an email address to their customer support team if you ever find yourself in a weird situation, or if you just need some help from the EnoCaption team. In the meantime, here's my advice. So sometimes when I'm switching between ASR and a live stenographer, sometimes while that transitioning is happening, I'll miss a couple words of what the person said just because we're switching gears in the app. And maybe the live stenographer couldn't quite get on as fast as the person was speaking. So when that happens, I just say, hey, I'm so sorry you dropped out for a bit. Do you mind repeating yourself? I just try to be as confident and direct as I can. That way they're happy to repeat themselves. All right, y'all, that concludes our video today. I hope you found this to be super helpful. And again, if you are someone with hearing loss or someone who's deaf and you have struggled making phone calls, I say, why not give this app a whirl, right? It's free because it's funded by the FCC. It has helped me become independent when making phone calls. And independence is freedom, and freedom is joy. So thank you, Eno Caption, for sponsoring this video. If you guys have any questions about how the app works, how they find live stenographers, more questions about privacy, feel free to leave your questions below. And I'll try to do a follow-up Q&A video with the Eno Caption team themselves. So see you next time.