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Around five per cent of the world's population suffer from hearing loss, and keeping up with conversation at a busy restaurant or in a group meeting, can be almost impossible – even if they are lip reading experts.

But now there's an app that translates speech into written words that show up on a smartphone, even when people are all talking at once.

The app, called Transcense, is the brainchild of four graduate students, who have all been affected by hearing loss in different ways.

The app, called Transcence (pictured) is the brainchild of four graduate students, who have all been affected by hearing loss in different ways. It translates speech into written words that show up on a smartphone, with individuals' speech shown in different colours

They are raising money on crowd funding site Indiegogo to bring their app to market. 

'We developed Transcense to end the professional and social exclusion caused by hearing loss.

'Transcense brings meaning to the conversation and allows the deaf person to actively engage again,' they claim.

The app translates speech into words that appear on a smartphone in real-time.

To do this, it connects to a number of phones and activates their microphones, to accurately capture what people nearby are saying.

This diagram shows how the app connects to multiple smartphones and uses their microphones to listen and interpret the conversation, which is shown on themain user's screen

The app then uses a voice recognition algorithm to link detect individual voices and link each of them with a colour, which makes it easy for the app's user to see who is talking on their smartphone screen.

A deaf person can also use the app to speak for them using a digital voice, or to get the attention of all the people present, via their smartphones.

The graduates, from the University of San Francisco and Berkeley, have so far raised more than a fifth of their $25,000 (£15,707) goal, which they will use to develop the final Android version of their app, as well as an iOS and web version.

A one-year subscription to the app is available to pre-order for $150 (£94) and will cost $360 (£226) for non-earlybirds, if the graduates reach their funding goal.

The four graduates all have experience of hearing loss, because one of them was born into a deaf family, another is deaf and the other two have learned American Sign Language.