Smart Glasses for hearing impaired/deaf

It’s fantastic if it truly means what it says on the box, company/marketing department hype/blurb is always a little different from real world experience, just look at the HA marketing hype! But one thing that’s stood out was their claim “people with hearing loss are seeking alternatives to hearing aids” I’m not sure who they were talking to, but I’d guess people actually would still want to “hear” the conversation going on around them, so people are going to want to use smart glasses and their HAs, this way you get the best of both worlds! Just like watching a movie with subtitles.

This changes nothing. You have been reading too much PR. The battery life is going to be short, the caption won’t be as good as the Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM cloud speech to text engine… Noise will be a problem and always will be a problem. big 4 have this problem and i don’t think small company solved this problem… From my experience, Smart Glasses have a long way from being usable in a real world…

This won’t replace hearing aid or CI as bit does not help broken senses and medicare will not cover these devices because it does not help medically diagnosis of hearing loss…

Could be game changer. Real time captioning is one of the key questions, but I don’t think there will be much of a delay. Also I know eye wear/glass style will improve over time so you won’t be able to tell the difference between normal glasses and smart glasses.

I’m obviously impressed with Vuzix but will hold my powder for a while since Apple, Google, MIcrosoft, Meta and I believe Amazon are all coming out with versions of Smart Glasses.

In any case like anything the first round of Smart Glasses will probably be expensive but over time with more competition prices will drop. What I find really interesting is that it appears Smart Glasses don’t need t be connected to a smartphone, iPhone or what ever. So i guess everything is built into eyeglass frame work. Need to check that since there is going to be different variations of glasses from different manufacturers and as time goes by I think the “sun glasses” look will disappear with glasses lenses looking some what clear and normal.

@stevemink said:

Previous poster “SAA” has no clue other then he’s some ex software engineer that knows nothing.

WOAH, You have no idea who are talking to here. I work for a large corporation and i am not an ex Software Engineer here…

You Sir - are in denial. And have yet to post any article to support your fabricated position.

Cvkemp - I am someone that have tried those things and they effect me the same as a 3D movie, I get dizzy and disoriented. I have always been that way. I also totally dislike video games.

I also wonder how someone’s general eyesight will function in tandem with reading closed-caption print. Its going to be a little tricky what percentage of glass less is general viewing and what percentage is CC. it appears with XanderGlasses, you can position the text in various lens locations.

So many positives here, but wonder if DMV will allow drivers to drive with Smart Glasses on, while CC is working?

They’re hoping for northern hemisphere spring- could be eleven months- and what they showed at CES was a mock-up so it’s basically a statement of intent at this point.

I’ve never seen a computer transcribe speech in apparent real time and they want to do it with a processor that fits in the frame of a pair of glasses? Hats off to them if they can do it.

Focal length? Unless they’ve got a way of automatically adjusting the text to be at the same distance as the speaker’s head it’s going to be a headache-inducing nightmare. Not to mention that you’ll look really, really weird. Unless there’s some very clever algorithms to move the text away from the speaker’s face (which there don’t seem to be), you’re going to have to keep your head very very still. Driving? Forget it. Multiple speakers? aargh!

@d_Wooluf said:

I’ve never seen a computer transcribe speech in apparent real time and they want to do it with a processor that fits in the frame of a pair of glasses? Hats off to them if they can do it.

Yea, that’s going to be interesting to learn how they pull that off, with such limited frame space. Regarding smart glasses appearance - its still early in the game. Come back in a year or so with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon’s smart glasses hitting the market and I bet you’ll have a hard time telling which is normal eye wear and what is smart glasses.

Driving - multiple speakers? One passenger - multiple speakers?
If you’re talking car speakers/audio - Smart Glasses were not designed to work with music.

My assumption at this point is that XanderGlasses will work well with one on one conversations, with the speaking party directly in front of you. Throw in four, five plus people talking in a room and I see “possible overload” regarding text printout.

But again lets see what the Big tech companies come out with. And with more competition coming, what might cost $1500 for Smart Glasses (now), might drop to under $800 in a year or two.

@prodigyplace said:

They could use cellular data and a cloud server. That could also mean restrictions on usage in security sensitive environments.

In our R&D playground, we have been experimenting with a offline speech to text engine, it is impressive but it lags behind some of the major cloud providers…

@stevemink I meant multiple people speaking.
@ssa Well, there’s this3.

“We’ve trained and are open-sourcing a neural net called Whisper that approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.”

Really Cool, I believe this is definitely the way forward for people with severe/profound hearing loss, used in conjunction with ones HAs, it’ll be a game changer for sure, it’s moving pretty quickly now.

Layoff is happening, money losing project such as the smart glasses project are being gutted.

We cut project that aren’t viable all the time, sorry to say this but that the nature of the corporate world.

Oh no say it ain’t so, these people need more funding not less, Crowdfunding or something similar if they have to!

@tenkan said:

Crowdfunding or something similar if they have to!

Wishful thinking but no, it needs continuous funding in millions of dollars…