Vigilant Ear
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Vigilant Ear 👂🛡️

An acoustic radar for people who can't hear.

An app built specifically for the Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and CODA community. Most sound-recognition apps tell you what a sound is. Vigilant Ear tells you where it is, who's making it, and what they're saying — turning an iPhone into a real-time sonic tricorder that describes the sound around you.

A siren's direction and distance. A knock behind you. The people in a conversation, drawn as separate transcribed voices — each one captioned and directionally placed. If someone is speaking a language you don't read, their words can arrive translated into yours. Alerts reach your Lock Screen, Dynamic Island, and Apple Watch so a glance is enough.

Everything that matters runs on the device. Audio is not recorded or uploaded for recognition. Nothing depends on hearing a thing.

Who it's for

Vigilant Ear is an accessibility aid, not a certified life-safety device.

What it does

🧭 It sees sound — direction & distance

Using the iPhone's stereo microphones, Vigilant Ear estimates the bearing and rough distance of sounds around you and places them as live markers on a heading-up radar ring and map. Move, and the markers hold their real-world position. This is the core: spatial awareness of a world you can't hear.

🚨 It recognizes important sounds — and warns you

An on-device classifier identifies hundreds of everyday sounds and watches the critical categories — sirens, alarms — including a dedicated car-alarm class — doorbells/knocks, baby cry, a person nearby, and severe weather. When one fires, you get a clear on-screen alert, optional push notification, and a distinct haptic — even when the app is backgrounded or the phone is asleep. Critical categories default ready so enabling notifications doesn't mean “everything off.” Turn all alert categories off and the engine fully hibernates while backgrounded to save battery. A Sentinel layer cross-checks alerts against independent evidence — direction, motion, and public feeds — so what fires is corroborated, not a lone classifier guess. It works both ways: a siren-shaped moment inside a song gets held, but a real siren repeating through your music breaks through and alerts.

Severe-weather warnings come from official public feeds — U.S. NWS, Europe MeteoGate, China CMA, Korea KMA, Japan JMA, Canada ECCC, and Brazil INMET — free for all users. Feeds are narrowed to the ones that cover where you are.

⌚ Apple Watch + Live Activity — glance and know

💬 Speaker Mode — live, directional captions (free)

Turn on Speaker Mode and Vigilant Ear transcribes people talking near you into caption blocks, one per voice. On-device speaker diarization keeps voices distinct — who is saying what — with a directional cue on the inner ring. The live speaker is highlighted; older text scrolls away as space is needed.

Two things most caption apps won't do: honesty about confidence — a subtle per-row quality mark and dotted underlines beneath doubtful words tell you when to trust a line and when to double-check — and self-correction: right after a sentence lands, the app re-reads the audio with full context and can restore a missed or misheard word within a couple of seconds, then the text freezes.

Captions are free; automatic translation is the optional Power Pack+ layer. Captions can also be spoken aloud to your Bluetooth hearing devices — free, in Preferences. Direction Tones (also free, in Preferences → Captions) add an optional audio cue in the ear you choose that signals where a speaker is — useful with a hearing aid or single-sided hearing, and available to anyone.

🌐 Speaker Auto-Translate — your language, live (Power Pack+)

With Speaker Mode on, when a nearby person speaks another language, Vigilant Ear can detect it and render their captions in your language, with the source language shown on their block. The chain — hear → separate speakers → transcribe → translate → display — runs on the device; the only network moment is a one-time language-pack download from Apple. You don't have to know or pick the other language first.

This is the closest shipping thing to science fiction's universal translator — the device that simply understands. Vigilant Ear detects the language on its own, follows every speaker in the room, and captions them all in your language — no earbuds, no setup, on your device.

graph LR
    A["Just listen"] --> B["Language detected automatically"] --> C["Every voice separated"] --> D["Whole room captioned in your language"]

🎵 Music & broadcast awareness (Power Pack+)

ShazamKit identifies music playing around you and tracks song changes.

🎛️ Acoustic Scope — see sound like an engineer (Power Pack+)

A professional live view of the sound around you: spectrum, spectrogram, ⅓-octave RTA bands, chroma, and harmonic partials — plus tools to capture sounds for training your own custom packs.

📦 Custom Sound Packs — teach it your world (Power Pack+)

Teach Vigilant Ear the sounds that matter to you — from local birds to your building's door chime. Add-on packs stack on top of the built-in detection, so new sounds never crowd out sirens and alarms. A step-by-step guide is built into the app.

🛰️ Constellation — many iPhones, one shared ear (Power Pack+)

With two or more Ultra-Wideband-enabled iPhones (most since iPhone 11), Constellation pairs them so they can sense each other's position and fuse what each one hears into a single, more precise picture of where a sound is coming from — a distributed, passive listening array. Gated to devices with the right hardware. Mesh captions older than a peer's connect time are not retransmitted.

Partner messages — send a quick text to a linked partner's phone; it lands in their caption feed and can arrive translated into their language, on-device. Messaging is age-aware: built on Apple's Declared Age Range, texting between an adult and a minor stays off unless both people have deliberately named each other. Alerts and captions are never gated — only person-to-person texting.

📷 Camera AR — “see the sound”

Open the camera pill on the title rail and pin detected sounds at their real bearing in the live camera view. Markers cluster by speaker or by sound category and direction so the view stays readable; sources age-fade when they go quiet.

🗺️ Maps, roads & path prediction

Sound bearings project onto real GPS coordinates on the map. Vehicle sounds can be snapped to nearby streets and their paths predicted so a passing truck reads as moving along the road rather than through buildings. (Try the fire-truck demo.)

🪄 Feature Playground — prove it without ears

Feature Playground is public for everyone: Home & Street practice (knock, alarm, baby, siren, weather), multi-phone and conversation demos, and a clear watermark so practice never pretends to be a live event. Closing the panel tears demos down cleanly (no stuck GPS spoof, no leftover flags).

♿ Accessibility first

Built for Deaf / hard-of-hearing / CODA and color-blind users: color-independent cues, ≥44 pt tap targets, Reduce Motion respect, multimodal alerts (haptic + visual + Watch), and a startup verification screen that shows permission status with clear green / grey / red (and burnt-orange “disallowed”) states — including the notification grant that acts as the master alert switch.

Free & Power Pack+

The safety core is free, forever:

Power Pack+ is a one-time unlock (not a subscription) with a 90-day free trial. It adds the superpowers:

Free or Power Pack+, your audio stays on the device for recognition — the tier only changes which features are unlocked, never where raw audio is sent for analysis.

How it works (under the hood)

Vigilant Ear is a local-first, on-device pipeline built in layers: capture once, then let independent specialists read the same sound and check each other's work. Raw audio is captured on a high-priority tap, copied into a pooled buffer free-list (no alloc thrash on the realtime path), and fanned out without stalling the UI:

graph TD
    A["Stereo mic tap"] --> B["Pooled buffer snapshot"]
    B --> C["Sound classifier<br/>(Apple Neural Engine)"]
    B --> Y["Second-opinion classifier<br/>(YAMNet, ANE)"]
    C --> S["Sentinel — evidence layer<br/>corroborates, vetoes, escalates"]
    Y --> S
    S --> H["Alerts · haptics · Watch · Live Activity"]
    B --> D["Spatial math<br/>TDOA · Doppler → bearing & distance"]
    D --> R["Radar ring · map · Camera AR"]
    B --> F["Speech recognition<br/>(SpeechAnalyzer)"]
    B --> E["Voice identity<br/>(ReDimNet embeddings, ANE)"]
    F --> G["Caption rows — one per voice"]
    E --> G
    G --> T["On-device translation<br/>→ your language"]

No single model is trusted alone. The Sentinel layer sits between detection and alerting: independent engines corroborate or veto each other frame by frame — and when repeated real-world evidence piles up against a veto (a real siren wailing through your music), the evidence wins and the alert fires.

Captions get their own second chance. Every finalized sentence is quietly re-read from a short in-memory audio ring with full context — corrections land within about two seconds, then the text freezes for good:

graph LR
    L["Live caption appears"] --> K["Raw audio re-read<br/>with full context"] --> V["Guarded comparison<br/>(keeps what was heard)"] --> W["Row quietly corrected<br/>≤ 2 s, then frozen"]

Weather takes the opposite path from audio — nothing about your sound ever goes out, but alert data comes in. European alerts flow through a small cache we operate, so one fetch of the official data serves every user:

graph LR
    P1["Vigilant Ear<br/>On Your Device"] --> W["Wingdings alert cache<br/>one shared copy · 15-minute refresh"]
    W --> M["Official MeteoGate data<br/>(Europe)"]
    P1 -.direct.-> N["NWS · JMA · KMA · CMA<br/>ECCC · BOM · INMET · USGS"]

Privacy

Full details: PRIVACY.md · TERMS.md · SUPPORT.md

Hardware & platforms

Current App Store version: 1.1.0. Built for modern iOS (SpeechAnalyzer-era).

Localization

Fully localized — interface, alerts, and captions — into English, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), French, German, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Russian (11 languages). Follows the system locale or a manual choice in the app.

Status & disclaimer

Vigilant Ear is an experimental acoustic-accessibility aid, not a certified life-safety utility. Localization resolution varies with surroundings, weather, wind, and microphone hardware. Always maintain your typical environmental awareness — don't rely on it as your only source of safety information.

Some capabilities (camera AR markers, Critical Alerts entitlement upgrade when granted by Apple, advanced multi-pack sound authoring) continue to evolve; the free Home / Street watch and live captions are the product you can trust day one.

Contact: vigilantear@wingdingssocial.com

Made with ❤️ for the D/HH community and acoustic research.

Wingdings, Inc.

© 2026 Wingdings, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Patent Pending