US Patent 7003082 System for text assisted telephony

An arrangement for providing captioned telephone service is provided which permits persons who are hard of hearing to receive captioning of their telephone communications as they need it. A personal interpreter/captioned telephone device can dial a relay on a second telephone line while the assisted user if conversing with a hearing user over a first telephone line. The second telephone line connects to a relay which provides voice to text translation service and returns a text stream to the captioned telephone device.