Hearing impaired - radio comms

[markxengineerin]

I like the idea, better than nothing, but not as good as having it written out, because that would solve the noise issue and having to press buttons with wet hands, etc. Some of these fishing boat operators, I cannot understand them in my native English, I can't imagine how difficult it might be in other countries. So far this looks the most promising, but I don't have a Rapspberry Pi to try it out with- they are hard to find for a reasonable price right now, market shortage
https://www.hackster.io/petewarden/r...erry-pi-50b0e6

[Uricanejack]

Yes sort off.
For receiving Distress Nav Warning weather warnings ect
It’s Called Navtex been arround for about 40 years AFAIK still operates.
Small digital receivers are available. Cost ? Availability ?
Doesn’t work for back and forth call just information sent by CG radio.

[markxengineerin]

Thanks for the tip on Navtex- it seems like this system is on the way to obsolescence, but similar to what I had in mind, only it does not use audio as a base, it is separate signals entirely with error checking etc.

Judging from how bad Siri and Alexa are at understanding me, the VHF audio to text translator would not be a perfect system, but it would still be helpful if it could catch the name of my boat or the gist of a message. A lot of times I'm busy with something and half hear my boat being hailed, but I'm not sure if it's just me being paranoid. It would be nice to take a look at the LCD screen and confirm.
My VHF (Standard Horizon GX2000) has an output for a 4 ohm speaker- as a temporary solution, does anyone know if I could connect it directly to a device like this, and then use any bluetooth noise cancelling headphones?
https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Tra...693386915&th=1

I think that would also be a big improvement, and I'd like to get some noise cancelling headphones to save my ears on long motoring trips anyway.

[deblen]

Recommend you always use an external speaker on marine VHF radios. The built in 2" speaker just doesn't cut it.
https://www.amazon.com/vhf-external-...ternal+speaker

[wholybee]

Originally Posted by markxengineerin

I am bumping this back up to the top for discussion, because, how is this not a product yet!? So many times the messages we need to receive are very technical- long strings of GPS coordinates warning about the location of a hazard, or vessel in distress, weather reports that are too quick to copy down every detail, so I end up listening to the loop 3 times. Trying to do any of this while handling a boat in heavy weather, over wind/engine noise- forget about it!

A simple screen that displays the last 10 lines of VHF transmission in text form would be a game changer! Even without any "save" functions, I could take photos of what I need to keep beyond 10 lines.

Does such a thing exist? Would you buy one for $50 if it did?

It would probably be pretty expensive to put together, or very difficult if you were not licensing technology from someone else. Good speech recognition software is upwards of $150 per seat. Plus, you will need some really good audio filter software.

It will probably get much easier/faster with AI, which could be trained on noisy bad audio. But you would need thousands of hours of VHF/SSB recordings, and someone to transcribe them to train the AI.

Once trained the model could probably run on a single board computer.

I agree it would be a great product, and would probably have wide adoption, but I don't see how it could reach a $50 price point. I would guess $500ish.

[Time2Go]

Don't know if it ever made it into a commercial product but I have a
Tasmanian friend who has significant hearing loss. A few years ago he was
involved with a group of university students who were experimenting with
a device that looked like a pair of ordinary eye glasses.
This device did voice to text and then projected it on the inside of the glasses
but was invisable to anyone else. Worked like a telepromter/HUD.
Had a belt mounted brain and battery pack
Cheers
Neil

[ChrisJHC]

Just had a look at some of the commercial voice-to-text systems and they were both expensive and required a wifi connection.