https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/10/ava-expands-its-ai-captioning-to-desktop-and-web-apps-and-raises-4-5m-to-scale/

The worldwide shift to virtual workplaces has been a blessing and a curse to people with hearing impairments. Having office chatter occur in text rather than speech is more accessible, but virtual meetings are no easier to follow than in-person ones — which is why real-time captioning startup Ava has seen a huge increase in users. Riding the wave, the company just announced two new products and a $4.5 million seed round.

Ava previously made its name in the deaf community as a useful live transcription tool for real-life conversations. Start the app up and it would instantly hear and transcribe speech around you, color-coded to each speaker (and named if they activate a QR code). Extremely useful, of course, but when meetings stopped being in rooms and started being in Zooms, things got a bit more difficult.