What are the best caption reading glasses?

I bought Even Realities G1B, which are probably the best glasses without a camera in the market.

Pretty expensive but they look gorgeous (and nobody even notices they’re smart glasses) and work well with captions… And that’s what really matters to me.

I’ve been watching the progress of caption reading glasses for some time and can tell you the best is yet to come. It appears Samsug will come out with Smart Glasses this year and have English to English transcription. There are a lot of Smart Glasses that will have English translation with French, Spanish, German, etc., but that doesn’t help anyone who is deaf or sturggles with power hearing aids. Samsug I think will be the first (BIG PLAYER) to offer English captionioning September on this year.
Then comes Google and Meta. Yeah Meta been out now for a couple years but glasses have not yet offered English to English captioning. Google will offer their own glasses but also will be teaming with Samsug/technology so I’m going to assume Goggle glasses in 2026 offers English captioning. Meta might come out end of this year witn English transcription but that’s still up in the air.
Lastly Apple is now in the game but I’m assumeing they won’t go live with Smart Glass captioning until 2027. Could be wrong but I’m betting all of these Big Tech companies blow away China based smart glasses as well as the small players in the U.S.

And I think all of the above will have glasses to phone connection to handle captioning. There area very view smart glasses right now that are stand alone. Many Xander and at $5,000 a poplthose glasses are way, way over priced. I’m guess Samsung glasses come out say around $800 a frame and will be offered with prescription lens/

I’ve seen a lot of ads for “Hearview Subtitle Glasses.” They’re very expensive, almost $1,000.
I hope in a few years, when there’s more competition, everything will come down in price. It’s an excellent tool for all of us who don’t yet want to take the step toward CI.

Until they becom common remember using live cations on your iPhone or Droid works really well especially in a vehicle or restaurant.

I disagree, it’s very awkward trying to have a conversation with someone while looking at your phone!

Watch and wait is great, unless you are in your 90’s like my father in law. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to have a conversation with him which is causing him to become withdrawn. Any recommendations from what is available NOW. also, simple to use for the elderly crowd.

Unfortunately current smart glasses with English to English transcription/captioning are a moving target. Hearing Tracker came out with a really good review a few months back regarding what’s currently on the market.

I’ll throw out two names but both smart glasses are not perfect.

Xander Glasses - seem to have hit the sweet spot as far as put on and go as far as glass display captioning. From what I’ve read they seem to offer a high level/percentage of display accuracy when other people talk. They also work stand alone and do no need to be connected to cell phone nor blue tooth I beleive. The negatives are they are very over priced and at $5000 and should be priced under $2000. Secondly they have lousy battery life and last I reviewd might last three to four hours before you have to recharge. Battery length might be longer if connected to cloud, but don’t hold your breath. And there might be montly fee to connect to the cloud. They also look really bulkly and might not be comfortable to wear. You have some serious glass temples on each side extending way past your ear.

The other might be XRAI AR2 which this month is coming out with new smart glass model. XRAI finally made the jump from hard line cord connection to wireless. They also look very good frame wise and are price considerably cheaper than Xander. They also have 8 hours of battery life. Where I believe they fail is in two area. One is without a cloud connection you have something like 81% caption accuracy which is not going to cut it. And I bet the 81% number is pumped higher then it should be. To improve display caption accuracy you have to pay a monthy fee of $30 a month to access the cloud. I could possible accept that but you have to read the fine print before jumping into a cloud connection. Its only for 18,000 minutes for like 30 hours of use. That’s for a period of a month. Not sure why anyone would want to pay for say two or three days of improved.captioning accuracy, then the rest of the month go back to 81% caption accuracy.

Secondly if you need prescription lens, you have to order then insert less (yourself) into the glass frames. So your actually adding a second lens that is manually inserted by pushing into glass frames. This to me sounds like a train wreck coming since the prescription lens might not fit properly, could pop out and how do you clean in between both lens. And one has to wonder if you drop your glasses could prescripton lens pop out?

Unfortunately the big players all seem to be gearing towards English to foreign language translation (French, Spanish, ,etc.) and don’t want to be bothered with English to English. Meta is coming out later this year with new glasses but I don’t think they will have a display or English to English transcription. Samsung has some announcement in September coming for new smart glasses but I don’t think they will offer a display for English to English transcription. Google seems to pushing off their smart glasses until late 2026 and no one know a thing about them. Apple now is looking at 2027 and not saying a word of what’s coming.

My suggestion to you is try to hold off buying anything until CES convention in early January, 2026. That’s when you’ll be able to see or hopefully trial new smart glasses to hopefully hit the market. But waiting game is a royal pain in the kazoo, and to be honest the smaller (riskier) smart phone companies seem to be offering more hope to the deaf and hearing imparied than the big tech companies.

Also critical (I believe) is that both glass lenses show captioning. It appears when just one lens is used for display captioning, it can strain the users eyes, cause headaches, etc. When I googled I found this. Note when wearing smart glasses with a single, one-eye display (monocular) with captioning can cause headaches and eye strain for some users.

Unfortunately right now I’m not sure how many smart glasses currently caption both lenses. The one negative I see using both lenses to transcribe English or general translation is that the user will then have his over all vision diminished when wearing glasses for things like eating, walking, watching T.V. Unless lens captioning can be located to the side or above or below normal glass viewing. All tricky.

@yayspay said:

Any recommendations from what is available NOW. also, simple to use for the elderly crowd.

You might consider the Nuance glasses. They are OTC hearing aids built into glasses. So no captions, but have microphones built into the arms of the glasses. Nothing goes into the ears.. They are rechargeable by setting them on a special charging plate. I’ve demo’d them and was impressed at the ability to hear in noise. You can buy them at LensCrafters which sells glasses so you can get them with a prescription. LensCrafters has a good demo set up to try them out, and they are very easy to use. I think WallMart Vision Centers might also sell them and you may find them at some other Opticians.

My husband bought the Captify but - The captions were slow until he upgraded from his iPhone 14 to the new iPhone 17 Pro. Now the captions are real time.

Also tried Captify for my elderly father. He was initially thrilled, but there was repeated issues with “no internet” popping up on the glasses display. After many emails with the company, and even getting a second pair sent out for us to try…nothing has changed. He must repeatedly either swipe out of the app, toggle off bluetooth, or shut down the glasses completely to get them to start working again. This happens multiple times a day. Sometimes 3 times in an hour and he is understandably frustrated. He has an old phone (Iphone 8) which does run IOS16 but I after seeing your post, I wonder if the phone is part of the problem. Does your husband have issues with “no internet” displaying on his glasses?

Captify glasses are not reliable and have connection issues. The company has also changed it name several times. Until smart glass manufacturers get around the battery supply issue, its going to be hit and miss with many of these glasses. Duel lens display will far outsell single lens display going forward, but unfortunately duel diplay lesses will most likely eat up battery life faster and might require larger frames.

they don’t pick up voices for me. They are good with one on one and sometimes not even then. It’s hit or miss. When they pick up voices it’s great but I can be two feet from someone and the only voice the G1s transcribes is mine.