THE CHALLENGE
The founder had a genuinely hard idea: real-time captions on live phone calls for people with hearing loss, on both iOS and Android, without asking anyone to change their phone number, and compliant with the FCC rules for captioned telephone service. That problem sits where four difficult things meet at once – telephony, speech recognition, the way mobile systems handle calls, and regulation. You cannot just start building it. One wrong assumption about call routing or compliance is the kind of thing you pay for twice.
WHAT WE DID
We turned the idea into a specification a developer could actually build from. We mapped the full call path – how an incoming call forwards into a dedicated caption-routing number, gets transcribed, and reaches the user on the familiar native call screen – and the outgoing path through an in-app dialer. Then we pinned down the parts most likely to bite later: what caller ID shows, what happens when forwarding quietly fails, and how iOS and Android differ when a call arrives with the app closed. We specified the caption pipeline end to end, from call audio through speech recognition to live text, and scoped the first release down to English and Spanish so it could realistically ship.
WHAT THEY GOT
A developer-ready package the client owns outright, buildable with us or with anyone else. It covers the call-routing model, the caption pipeline, the platform-specific call handling, caller ID and its fallbacks, and the call-record and traceability requirements the regulation demands. The expensive decisions were made on paper, where they are cheap to change, instead of in code, where they are not.
The value
The point of Discovery is that the expensive questions get answered before anyone writes code. For a product this regulated, that is the whole difference between a clean build and a rebuild. The team left owning a specification detailed enough to hand to any developer, with the riskiest assumptions already resolved and written down.
- Full call flow specified, from a forwarded incoming call to live captions on the native call screen.
- The edge cases most likely to bite – forwarding failure, caller ID, app-closed calls – decided up front.
- A buildable package the client owns, with no dependence on us to move forward.
“I came in with an idea and a stack of regulations I only half understood. I left with a document our developers could build from, and a clear view of where the genuinely hard parts actually were.”
– Founder, accessibility startup