Google talks about Live Relay, a project for phone calls without voice or hearing

Google took the stage at the Google I/O conference in California to talk about an interesting research project, Live Relay. Using on-device speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion, the project will allow the phone to listen and speak on the users' behalf while they type. By offering instant responses and predictive writing suggestions, Smart Reply and Smart Compose help make typing fast enough to hold a synchronous phone call. Live Relay could help people make and receive phone calls without voice or hearing.

In the U.S., for example, there are relay and real-time text (RTT) services available for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. These offer advantages in some situations, and Google's goal is not to replace these systems. Rather, Google aims to complement them with Live Relay as an additional option for the contexts where it can help most, like handling an incoming call or when the user prefers a fully automated system for privacy consideration.