While Google’s glasses have not had the expected success, the futuristic idea of smart glasses remains in the air. Two ex-students developed their more affordable version to help the hearing impaired understand their interlocutor using augmented reality.
“Subtitles for real life”, this is how the two inventors present their TranscribeGlass. The glasses look like all the others except for a small object attached to the right side which allows you to capture, transcribe – transcribe in English – and display in real time what is said. The text is displayed on the right glass. The advantage is that it is possible to watch the person speaking, unlike applications like Otter.ai or the Google Live Transcribe function, which are also capable of transcribing a speech live, but which require you to watch the screen of a phone or computer.
TranscribeGlass is intended for the hearing impaired but can also be used to have subtitles during a film at the cinema or during a conversation in a noisy bar, for example. The quality of the text display can clearly improve – long words do not fit on one line – but the user already has the possibility of changing certain things, the size and position of the text in particular.
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The challenge: making this technology affordable
The inventors are two students just out of school. The first, Madhav Lavakare, had a deaf friend in high school. The latter had to stop school because the establishment was not adapted to his disability and the tools that could help him were very expensive, several thousand dollars. It was 2017 and Madhav Lavakare thought it was incredible that he hadn’t yet designed devices that were more accessible to the general public. He began working on the concept of TranscribeGlass with the idea of reduced cost in mind, the price of Google Glass – around a thousand dollars – perhaps partly explaining their commercial failure. Aged 18 at the time, the Yale student had difficulty attracting investors. This kind of technology is less sexy than artificial intelligence, he points out.
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He had more or less abandoned his idea when he met Tom Pritsky, a young Stanford researcher in Silicon Valley. Hearing impaired since childhood, Tom Pritsky created a club for the deaf at university. He also prepared subtitles for augmented reality headsets. Together, they relaunched the project.
This summer 2023, a demonstration on Tik Tok has been viewed millions of times. The start-up had produced 150 models at the start of the year, they are on sale for 55 dollars, very inexpensive. But Madhav Lavakare and Tom Pritsky warn that this is not the final version. The expected price for this final version, which should weigh 30 grams, is $95. The price remains affordable for an object whose ambition is, according to its creators, to “solve the problem of hearing loss”.
A deaf Stanford professor tested the glasses and, despite initial reservations, told the Stanford Daily, the university’s newspaper, that she fell in love. She has no trouble imagining all the situations where these glasses could help her, when, for example, a loudspeaker calls her name in a waiting room.