New MIUI 12 subtitle mode negates need for headphones in noisy/quiet environments; suitable for hearing-impaired users too

Smartphones are growing ever so ubiquitous for the masses with millions of units sold worldwide each year. To cater to the diversity in the population, users with various impairments are also included.

Over the years, we’ve seen mobile operating systems get features that are aimed at making the devices more usable for users with hearing issues or visual disabilities.

Xiaomi’s current skin on top of Android, MIUI 12, bears many of the features we’ve seen on Android, including text-to-speech for users with visual disability but little has been available for users with hearing disability.

In a bid to more adequately cater to the needs of this demographic, Xiaomi is including a new feature in MIUI 12. Xiaomi Wensheng is a hearing aid tool jointly created by Xiaomi and a Chinese company.

Xiaomi jointly create hearing aids – Xiaomi sound APP, suitable for hearing-impaired users in a variety of scenes, support real-time speech text interoperability, Mandarin recognition accuracy of 98%

This tool, according to the announcement post on Weibo, allows users real-time voice and text conversion via subtitles on their devices’ display when activated.

While Wensheng is primarily meant for use by people with hearing impairment, it offers an interesting use-case, even for able-bodied persons.

Picture yourself in a noisy public place and you don’t have your earphones with you. Activating this feature effectively allows you to still follow on that video you’re watching with ease through the subtitles.

At the moment, this feature is still in development and Xiaomi is inviting willing participants to sign up for a closed Beta.

… You can now apply for in-house testing by going to Xiaomi Community App.

The company adds that this tool already has a 98% accuracy for Mandarin. A bold claim and one that is very impressive if it proves to be true.

At the moment, Wensheng is limited to China and Mandarin and we still don’t know if Xiaomi plans to extend the same to other regions across the Globe.

Seeing as how Google’s own Live Caption that debuted with Android 10 works, this feature sounds awfully similar.

We shall continue to keep an eye on Wensheng and update as and when we get more details so you might want to stay tuned to our dedicated Xiaomi section.

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