Vigilant Ear

Sci-fi's universal translator, made real: it detects the language on its own and captions the whole room in yours — no earbuds, no setup, all on your iPhone.

Designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing users who rely on visual captions and alerts. It's a visual, haptic tool - not built for blind users. The interface is high-contrast dark by design, and every alert is distinguished by shape and icon — never by color alone — so it works for color-blind users, too.

Free transcribed speech captions and sound alerts. Vigilant Ear turns your iPhone into a personal sound radar for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing — alarms, sirens, knocks, a crying baby, severe weather, and the voices around you — shown as instant visual and haptic alerts on a live map.

Using on-device machine learning, it identifies hundreds of everyday and emergency sounds in real time, estimates their direction and rough distance, and surfaces them the moment they happen. Live captions (Speaker Mode) transcribe the people near you, separated by speaker — all on-device (nothing sent to the cloud or off-device!)

Vigilant Ear is an experimental research and accessibility aid — not a certified or life-saving device. Always use your own situational awareness.

ALWAYS FREE: • Live captions of nearby speech (Speaker Mode), separated by speaker • Real-time alerts — alarms, sirens, knocks, doorbells, a crying baby, a person approaching • Official severe-weather warnings — US (NWS), Europe (MeteoGate), China (CMA), and Korea (KMA) — gated by geographic position of your device • Live radar map with directional guidance, multi-target tracking, and haptics • Alerts appear on your Apple Watch too, even when your iPhone is asleep as long as the app is running (even minimized) • Siri, Shortcuts & Action Button — ask "What's around me?" (or type it to Siri) for a spoken-and-on-screen summary of nearby sounds, and start or stop listening hands-free • 300+ on-device sound classifications — your audio or telemetry data never leaves your device

POWER PACK+ — optional, one-time charge • Translation — captions converted into your language, on-device • Constellation — link nearby iPhones into a shared, more precise picture of sounds (acoustic mesh/biangulation/triangulation) • Music & Sound ID — name the songs playing around you

Power Pack+ is free to try for your first 90 days; after that, captions and alerts stay free forever and a small one-time fee keeps the glamorous extras. No subscription, ever.

Privacy first: all listening, transcription, translation, and sound classification run entirely on your device. The only exception: if you use Music ID, a short audio fingerprint — never raw audio — goes to Apple's Shazam service to name the song. Compare that to other apps!

Built for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Stay aware.

THE UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR, FOR REAL Science fiction promised a device that simply understands — no setup, no picking languages. Vigilant Ear is the closest thing yet: it detects the language being spoken on its own, separates the voices, and captions every speaker in the room in your language, live and entirely on your device. It translates the whole room — no earbuds required.