[blaqsmith]

I am deaf, use hearing aids, and know only enough ASL to get in trouble. For socializing in groups I can't help much (I'm still trying to figure that one out), but for taking questions at conferences or presentations, you should consider CART. For phone calls, if you want to avoid the coldness of Relay, consider the VCO variation.

Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is what I used sporadically throughout college to understand those professors with a particularly heavy accent, and consists of a person in the audience typing out the audience questions on a laptop or transcribing machine. You hold a pager-like device which the typing is transmitted to. There's a slight delay while they type, but I found CART transcribers on a whole to be quite a bit better than Relay transcribers, in terms of speed. The downside is that it is expensive, $100-$200/hr here in the States, so it's only viable for important presentations. I was lucky in that my university had an accessibility program and covered this expense for me.

For phone calls (not so much busy conference calls, too slow), IF you are confident in your speaking voice and want to be able to convey the emotions behind your words, see if you have Voice Carry Over (VCO) available to you. This variation on relay is a 3-way call between you and the person you want to talk to, with the relay operator on the line as a non-speaking party. They will type the speech of the other party out for you, and you can speak for yourself.