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Wholisphere Docs

Hearing tools

Tools for users who can’t hear, or only partly. Three capabilities under the Hearing section of the popup.

Live captions

What it does. Real-time captions for any audio playing on the page. Uses the cloud speech-to-text API to transcribe what’s playing as it plays, displaying captions in a panel anchored to the corner of the viewport.

When to use. Any video or live audio without real captions (or with bad ones). Live podcasts, lecture streams, conference calls embedded in a web app.

How. Click Live captions in the popup. Wholisphere attaches to the audio output of the active media on the page. A caption panel appears at the bottom-right. Click again to stop.

Limits.

  • Some browsers and operating systems do not let extensions capture an arbitrary tab’s audio. Where browser API access is unavailable, Wholisphere falls back to capturing your microphone (so it transcribes anything you hear out loud through your speakers — useful as a workaround but not as good).
  • Cross-origin video embeds where the audio is locked to the iframe (some YouTube embeds) cannot be captured.

WCAG: 1.2.4 (Captions Live).

Transcribe audio

What it does. Builds a permanent, time-stamped transcript of any <audio> element on the page. Each transcript line is clickable — clicking seeks the audio to that timestamp. You can copy the transcript or download it as .txt or .srt.

When to use. Podcast pages, lecture recordings, news audio, embedded interviews. Anywhere the publisher offered audio but no transcript.

How. Click Transcribe audio. The panel lists every <audio> element on the page; click Transcribe next to one to start. Watch lines appear in real time as the cloud STT processes the file.

The transcript is yours — copy or download it from the panel.

Cost. Speech-to-text isn’t free. We surface the audio list so you choose which is worth transcribing rather than auto-running on every page.

WCAG: 1.2.1 (Audio-only Prerecorded — Level A).

Boost speech in audio

What it does. Enhances voice clarity in noisy audio by applying a real-time bandpass + de-noiser to the page’s audio output. Music and ambient noise are reduced; vocals come forward.

When to use. Lectures recorded in noisy halls, podcasts with heavy background music, video calls with a poor microphone on the other side.

How. Click Boost speech in audio. The boost is applied via the Web Audio API; the original page audio is replaced with the processed output until you turn it off.

Limits. Cross-origin media that doesn’t expose its audio node cannot be processed. DRM-protected media (Netflix, Spotify, etc.) cannot be processed either; that’s enforced by the browser, not by us.

WCAG: 1.4.7 (Low or No Background Audio).

See also