New App Allows Deaf People to Chat on Cell Phones

For most of the world, cell phones are indispensable. They're always within reach and we spend hours and hours making and receiving calls. But for the 70 million people with hearing loss, cell phones haven’t been as useful or as powerful- until now.

At the age of two, Olivier Jeannel was diagnosed with severe hearing. And now he's developed an app that provides subtitles for conversations in real time.

The way it works is that people talk and written words are typed out on the screen on the other end. For the very first time ever, this allows for people with hearing impairments to communicate with anyone who calls.

The app is called RogerVoice, and is expected to be available for download very soon with a full public version scheduled to be released early in 2015.