Mobile communication device for transcribing a multi-party conversation

A method for facilitating a conversation among a plurality of participants in sufficiently close proximity to one another to hear speech spoken by the other participants, each of said participants having a mobile communication device, comprising:

• receiving from a plurality of the mobile communication devices over a PAN a first plurality of messages that each include a first segment of text, an identifier of a participant who speech segment was transcribed into the respective first segment of text, and a timestamp indicative of a time when the first speech segment was spoken;
• selecting a second plurality of messages from among the first plurality of messages which all have a first common identifier;
• extracting the second text segments from the second plurality of messages;
• displaying the second text segments in a sequential order determined by their respective timestamps.

A mobile communications device, comprising:

• a network interface for communicating over a wide-area network;
• an input/output interface for communicating over a PAN;
• a display;
• one or more processors for executing machine-executable instructions;
• and
• one or more machine-readable storage media for storing the machine-executable instructions, the instructions when executed by the one more processors implementing,
• a) a voice proximity component configured to select a first user voice from among a plurality of user voices, said first user voice belonging to a first user who is in closest proximity to the mobile communication device;
• b) a speech-to-text component configured to convert to text in real-time speech received from the first user but not other users;
• c) a user interface arranged for displaying on the display text as it received over the PAN from other mobile communication devices.