Lack of Live Captions during phone calls on Fairphone

Discuss The Products
1

Live Captioning works ok to generate subtitles for general media (videos, etc) played on the Fairphones I have used, but NOT for phone calls. I’ve come to the realisation after purchasing an FP6 to replace my FP4 that it’s not an FP4 or FP6 issue specifically…

Context: Since Android 10, phones have had the capability of using a feature called “Live Captions”, which automatically captions speech in media played on the phone. This works fine in my experience with the FP4 and the FP6, but there is an extra useful feature missing…

Live captioning during phone calls.

According to Live Caption: Caption media & calls on your device - Android Accessibility Help , this is only available “Pixel and selected Android phones.”. It works on a relative’s Samsung S21, so I assume it also works on all Samsung devices succeeding that.

I have asked live chat support about this, and they say Fairphone devices do not have this because Google has not granted them access to the required deeper integration with proprietary services that is required to enable live captioning during calls. :melting_face:
I’m not sure why that is the case and why phone audio can’t be simply treated like the audio of other media, but obviously it is not ideal. And a bit of a slap in the face that Samsung can have such capability but not Fairphone.

Does anyone know:

  1. What can be done about this state of affairs? I really like Fairphone and would like to stop requiring a second phone exclusively to make calls with the super necessary captions on them.
    I’m starting to wonder if I should retire my FP4, return the FP6, and just use a Pixel or Samsung.
    Is there someplace I could email about this issue to try advocate for a solution?

  2. If there are already plans for this state of affairs to change? Is it planned by Google on future android versions to make this feature more implementable? Is Fairphone trying to get better access or whatever is required?

I hesitate to ping a Fairphone forum rep about this, but maybe if pinged they could clarify this issue some more? It’s a really disappointing accessibility issue for us deaf and hard of hearing people.

2

As a workaround, you could try third-party-apps. But I don’t know if they will work:

If it is not part of AOSP, the feature is exclusive to google and therefore Fairphone can’t do anything to change it. FP would have to create their own captions-service from scratch. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, because the amount of manpower compared to the amount of users that would use such an app is probably not worth it, especially because there seems to be apps that can do this already.

3

Thank you for the thought of trying to find a work-around, but the former I believe is USA-only and the latter is problematic according to the comments.

I already know of something that sort of works in several European countries:

It’s still not as convenient as using android’s live captioning would be, because:

  1. It requires a monthly subscription once your trial credits are used up.
  2. It cannot work at all for incoming calls unless you live in Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Israel, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, Slovakia, Sweden, United Kingdom, or the United States. Unlucky for someone in Ireland (like me) or one of the other dozens of European countries.
  3. Even if you live in one of those supported countries, you need to set up a process that involves call forwarding if you wish to use it on incoming calls.

So, as a hard of hearing person, I’m still interested in more information as to why quick and easy live captioning during phone calls is such a rarity outside of the usual suspects from Google and Samsung, and what can be done about this state of affairs. :frowning: Maybe we can hope the EU does something?
I know it’s not an ASOP feature, but if Samsung can get Google to give it, then I feel Google should allow other makers to use it.
To Fairphone, if it’s possible at all to implement more accessibility features found on Pixel and Samsung phones, I beseech you to do so.