dicto for families
A speech display for the kitchen table, the car, and the care-home lounge: you talk, your parent reads.
The dinner table
It starts small. A question has to be repeated, then repeated louder. The television goes up, the conversation goes down, and after a while the family talks around the person who cannot hear rather than to them. Hearing aids help, and there are still the mornings before they go in, the restaurant that is too loud for them, the week after a sudden change. Everyone ends up shouting, and nobody likes shouting at someone they love.
How dicto works
dicto is a speech display for iPhone and iPad. You set the phone or iPad on the table and talk at an ordinary level. Your words appear on screen as you say them, in large, clear text, in colors your parent picks. They read along and answer in their own voice. The first launch asks for a language and a color scheme; after that there are two buttons, one to speak and one to type.
Nothing is recorded, stored, or transmitted. There is no account to create, no subscription, and no cloud. When the app closes, the conversation is gone, which is how a private conversation should behave. Solo uses voice-isolation technology to help dicto focus on an enrolled voice, hands-free, for the times you want to talk without holding the phone.
Why it exists
dicto was built by Brent Burgess for his father, who is in his 80s, lives in a retirement community, and has been losing his hearing for years. His account of hearing loss in his family, and of what changed when the iPad went on the table, was published by the Hearing Health Foundation: "Instead of Yelling".
When hearing aids are not enough
dicto is not a hearing aid and does not compete with one. It covers the gaps: the device that is out or charging, the appointment where the explanation has to be understood, the noisy family gathering, the parent whose loss has moved faster than their fitting. Audiologists appreciate it for exactly those moments.
What dicto does not do
dicto is for spoken conversation with someone who has acquired or age-related hearing loss and reads fluently. It is not a replacement for sign language. Speech recognition comes from Apple's engine and is not perfect: accents, background noise, and people talking over each other can be misheard, and dicto shows one speaker at a time.
Getting it onto their iPad
dicto is $0.99 on the App Store, once. Install it on your parent's iPad or iPhone, or on your own, since the person speaking is the one who holds the device. The interface is in 14 languages and speech recognition covers more than 50.
What others have said
- Independent aging-technology analyst Laurie Orlov included dicto in "Five 2026 new technologies useful for older adults".
- The Hearing Health Foundation published the family story behind the app: "Instead of Yelling". More coverage and listings are on the press page.
Questions families ask
Does my parent need to learn anything? No. They read the screen. You hold the device and talk.
Does it work without Wi-Fi? Yes. Typing works fully offline, and dictation runs on the device for every dicto language except Hindi and Taiwanese Mandarin.
Is anything saved? No. Messages stay on screen until the app closes, then they are gone. Nothing is sent anywhere.
For care staff: speech on screen for residents with hearing loss