At a recent client lunch, Rogervoice founder Olivier Jeannel could read the face of the person across from him. Then the sun moved. By the time the main course arrived, he was squinting into the light. Instead of asking to switch seats in the middle of lunch, Jeannel glanced at the captions on his phone whenever the conversation got hard to follow. As he told audacitymagazine.com, his lunch companion “never knew the sun had won the seating battle.”
Jeannel, who has been deaf since age two, founded Rogervoice in 2014 because he wanted to make phone calls on the phone he already owned. Face-to-face conversations presented a different problem. Even when he could read someone’s lips, a simple turn of the head could leave him guessing. “I’m a pro lip-reader, until someone turns to check the menu mid-sentence, and I’m back to a confident nod and a quiet hope it wasn’t a question.”
What happens when everyone talks at once?
Rogervoice announced its free in-person captioning feature on November 4. Start a session in the app, and the words appear on your screen as people speak. You can adjust the caption display, and the app can caption without Wi-Fi or cell service once you’ve downloaded the language you need.
A client lunch with one person is one thing. Dinner with eight people talking across a long table is another. Jeannel compares it to putting a call on speakerphone. The closer people are to the phone and the less they talk over one another, the easier it is for the app to pick up what they’re saying. For a small group, he suggests placing the phone in the middle of the table and choosing a spot away from the loudest part of the room. The captions don’t label speakers. Jeannel says that’s on the company’s roadmap.
Before you start a conversation
Jeannel says Rogervoice covers the cost of in-person captioning and sets no limits on how long or how often you use it. Captioned phone calls are a separate service funded through a federal program for eligible users. Both features use the same app and sign-up process. The company’s response did not specify whether someone can complete U.S. registration solely for in-person captioning without certifying that they need captioned phone service.
There’s also a difference in how much control you have over transcripts. Rogervoice says it automatically saves in-person transcripts on your phone. Jeannel described a way to turn off transcript saving before a phone call, but did not identify an equivalent setting for in-person captioning. He also said users can’t currently delete transcripts from inside the app. If you’re opening the app for a private conversation, that’s a detail you’ll want to know before you start.
The company says in-person captioning requires iOS 26 or later on iPhone and is fully optimized from Android 12 onward. It lists 45 language and regional options on iPhone and 15 on Android. For example, iPhone users can select Spanish for Mexico or the United States, while the Android list includes Spanish for Spain. Download the option you need while you’re connected if you plan to use captions offline.
Rogervoice is available on the App Store and Google Play.
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