Vigilant Ear: Deaf Sound Alertv1.1.12

What changed

• New featureAdded distance scale and wind direction arrows to the map interface.
• UXImproved speech-to-text accuracy for multiple languages in noisy environments.
• PerformanceResolved memory leak during long captioning sessions.
• UXFixed issue where phone calls would terminate the app's listening function.
• LocalizationImproved weather warning translations and navigation between multiple alerts.
• PlatformEnhanced caption accuracy for Arabic and Hindi on devices with specific memory specs.
• PerformanceOptimized CPU usage on main thread by 80% during idle states.
• LocalizationUpdated localization for Traditional Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and French.
• PerformanceEnforced mandatory encryption for linked devices (Constellation).
• UXFixed bug where the final sentence before a pause was not captioned.

Original release notes

NEW — The map now shows a distance scale at the bottom, always visible, so you can tell how far away things are.

NEW — Wind on the map: whenever the weather radar is on, light arrows show which way the wind is blowing, anywhere in the world, updated every hour.

BETTER — Captions in loud places. On iPhones with the enhanced captions, an improved speech model makes far fewer mistakes in noise: in a loud bar on an iPhone 17, German captions went from 45% of words wrong to 20%, and Russian from 19% of characters wrong to 9%. Quiet rooms gain too: German from 8.4% to 6.4%, Russian from 5.6% to 3.2%. The same model captions English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. It replaces the old one by itself over Wi-Fi (about 730 MB).

BETTER — The first word of a sentence is no longer cut off, and captions are more accurate overall: on an iPhone 17, word errors fell from 6.7% to 5.4% in English and from 10.5% to 8.9% in German.

FIXED — Long captioning sessions no longer use more and more memory (about 135 MB more each hour before).

FIXED — A phone call that takes the microphone no longer closes Vigilant Ear. Listening comes back by itself when the call ends.

BETTER — Weather warnings show their official title in your language. In Arabic, a "Tropical Storm Watch" is no longer translated word for word into a wristwatch. NEXT in the warning panel steps through several warnings.

BETTER — Arabic captions are far more accurate on iPhones with at least 6 GB of memory that don't use the enhanced captions: the same recording went from 43% to 24% word errors on an iPhone 17. Hindi captions spell better there too, with character errors down from 25% to 15%.

BETTER — On an iPhone set to another country's region, German, French and Italian captions now use their own country's speech recognizer. German word errors fell from 25% to 9%.

FIXED — The last sentence before a pause no longer goes missing.

BETTER — Vigilant Ear does far less work when nothing is happening: about 80% less on the main thread at idle on iPhone 16 and 17.

BETTER — Traditional Chinese uses Taiwan wording, and several Russian, Arabic and French labels are corrected.

BETTER — Remote Link's video is bigger, and captions stay clear of it.

IMPORTANT — Linked phones (Constellation) are now always encrypted. Phones running Vigilant Ear 1.1.6 or older need to update to join.

And, miscellaneous improveme…