Support

Open Heard. The first time, iOS asks for permission to use the microphone and speech recognition; tap Allow. Captions start straight away and the yellow dot shows Heard is listening.

Hold the phone so the other person can talk normally. Their words appear on your screen. To reply, type in the box at the bottom or tap one of the quick phrases.

Tap Show them. Your reply fills the whole screen in large text so you can turn the phone around. Tap anywhere to go back to the captions.

If you'd like Heard to say the reply out loud as well, switch on Speak my replies aloud in Settings.

Yes. The default is "I'm deaf. Speak normally, I'll read your words here." Go to Settings, then Intro card, and write whatever suits you, for example "I'm hard of hearing, please face me while you talk."

Open the Duo like a book and start Heard. Turn on Lip view if it's off. The outer screen then shows the intro card to the person in front of you, followed by your replies and a small strip showing what Heard just caught, so they know their words landed.

On iPhone Duo, Apple only lets apps use the outer screen while a camera is running. Rather than run the camera for nothing, Heard puts it to work as Lip view: the back camera faces the person you're talking to, finds their face, and shows a steady close-up next to the captions so you can lip-read along.

The camera view is never recorded or saved. Frames are processed in memory and dropped. If you'd prefer not to use the camera, turn Lip view off. Heard then works on one screen, the same way it does on every other iPhone.

Yes. When you hold the phone facing you, the back camera faces the other person, so Lip view works the same way. Only the outer screen part is specific to iPhone Duo.

The free version captions in your iPhone's language, as long as on-device speech recognition supports it. English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese are among the supported languages, and Apple adds more over time.

Heard Plus lets you pick other caption languages and translate captions on device, for example to read a Spanish speaker in English.

Yes. Speech recognition and translation run on your iPhone. The first time you use a language, iOS may need a connection to download its language files. After that, Heard works in airplane mode, in a basement or anywhere without signal.

In a quiet place with one person speaking clearly, accuracy is usually very good. It gets worse with noise, music, distance, strong accents, uncommon names and people talking over each other. Moving closer to the speaker helps, and so does Lip view. Captions can always contain mistakes, so double-check anything important.

A one-time $12.99 purchase adds saved conversations with search and export, your own quick-phrase library, styles and text sizes for the outer screen, extra caption languages and on-device translation, and a choice of voice for spoken replies. It is not a subscription.

Sign in to the App Store with the same Apple Account you used to buy Heard Plus. Open Heard, go to Settings, then Heard Plus, and tap Restore Purchases. It's free and you can do it as often as you need.

Purchases are handled by Apple, so refunds are too. You can request one at reportaproblem.apple.com.

Not unless you ask it to. By default, captions disappear when the conversation ends. With Heard Plus you can tap Save, and that conversation is kept on your iPhone only.

Tap the menu at the top right, then Saved conversations. Swipe left on a conversation and tap Delete. To remove everything at once, go to Settings and tap Delete all saved conversations. Deleting the app also removes every saved conversation.

No. Heard has no servers and makes no network calls of its own, so nothing reaches us. The privacy policy explains the details.