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Phonak hearing aids, Pixel phones and captioning during BT phone calls

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I’m thinking of replacing my existing Samsung Android phone with a Pixel 8 phone because I keep seeing references to Pixel’s native support for live captioning of phone calls. However, I want to use my I90s Bluetooth connectivity AND have phone conversation captioning at the same time. Most captioning solutions seem to rely on the app having access to the phone’s microphone in order to work, but I use my microphones.

Does anyone have experience with this using a Pixel phone plus Phonak HAs via Bluetooth to caption live phone calls in real time?

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Yes, my Pixel 9 Pro (and I assume all recent Pixels) has Live Transcribe. It works regardless of any other setting. It works using or speaker. It def does not use the mic to transcribe, but internal circuits.

I have both Live Transcribe and Live Caption on my Samsung phone, but neither seem to work the way I would want to use them.

If tried enabling Live Transcribe as a test while using the speaker phone, it says that it can’t work because the phone’s microphone is in use by another app. If I enable Live Caption it just does nothing.

What would you use Live Caption for vs. Live Transcribe?

I’ll have to check and see what’s actually active. I wrote “Live Transcribe”, but that was from memory and may not be accurate. Let me check in a bit.

PS: “Captain Trips” was my CB handle back in the 70s, as a tribute to Jerry Garcia. yes, I’m that old.

In reply to @CaptainTrips

According to it doesn’t work on live calls.
I’ve notice that I have the words on the screen when talking to the computer on a call. When a live person answers it stops putting the words on the screen.
If you are in the US you could try I believe Ino Caption.

I have “Live Caption”, and it works on everything. I just tried a live person on a phone call, and it put captions on the screen as they’re talking. It works on podcasts, voice mails, live phone calls. And at the same time, is sending the audio to my devices (Phonak/).

It’s a Google function, although I don’t know if it’s unique to Pixels or not. But it works simultaneously with Bluetooth. I can turn it on & off via the Volume buttons.

You were considering a Pixel, weren’t you? That would work for you!

I’ve had every phone known to man (except iPh). Pixels are by far the best.

Found a refurbished Pixel 8 (immaculate) at a good price on Amazon and made the switch. Captioning is working. Mostly happy with it.

Android 14, and One UI 6 (if I remember correctly). When I unboxed my Pixel 8, Captioning didn’t work. Then, I realized that there was a major Android update (14 to 15) pending. After I updated, Captioning started working, so it may have been related to Android versioning. My A14 didn’t seem to be eligible for Android 15.

Live captioning is great - i have the Samsung S25 and it works … as long as wifi is switched off. But its accuracy is pretty good.

The Live Transciption thing unfortunately is dodgy, spitting out wildly inappropriate mistranslations that arent rude in a dictionary but rude in the context they appear in. Caused me some issues during a solemn bit on Sunday’s church service when it displayed something crude instead of talking about big gifts.

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