Both my husband and I have some hearing loss. We both have hearing aids but we always use the closed captioning when watching TV.
When he's talking on the phone, Lonnie has the most trouble hearing a high thin voice and also someone with quiet low tones.
Time and time again he will ask someone to "please speak up". They will do it for one or two sentences then they're back to their normal way of speaking.
When he saw an add for a "closed caption telephone" he was ready to order it right away.
He didn't buy his on Amazon but they are available there.
It arrived in a couple of days with an instructional DVD and plenty of information on how to get it working. All you need is an internet connection and phone service to the house (phone company, satellite, or cable company phone service).
It was easy to set up and there are lots of instructions right on the screen for all the functions.
It will even caption the messages left on the built in answering machine.
You'd think this would surely be expensive, right? Nope it's free (except for buying the phone).
Captioned Telephone works with a no charge captioning service where specially trained operators use advanced voice recognition technology to generate captions of everything the other person says. There are no monthly fees or service agreements and your monthly phone bill won't change.
So actually only the person with hearing loss is supposed to use the service.
So far it works good most of the time. There is a slight delay before the words come up,,, but it's really meant mostly to help understand a word or two that you didn't quite catch.
There isn't much punctuation in the captions and quite a few misspelled words. Lonnie had one call where the captioning just stopped in the middle of the conversation.
Overall he is happy with it and would recommend it.
It helps even more that the receiver has better clarity and some noise blocking.
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