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Meta might win "AR Glasses Race" for hearing impaired

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Edited

And I seriously doubt some of the smaller players (Xander, Vuzix, Xiao, etc.) will be able to compete with the likes of Meta and Samsung. Of course Apple will be entering the picture in three years or so, probably with Google but that’s a long way off.

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, which are essentially “Meta glasses with a display,” are being developed to include features that can transcribe speech to text in real-time, making them potentially useful for individuals with hearing impairments; this functionality is achieved through advanced capabilities that translate spoken words into visible captions on the glasses display.

Looks like it coming 2nd half of 2025.

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Serious question - Is there a huge market clamoring for this? Or is it really a “just because we can” novelty?

I ask this because on the one hand, something like that could be helpful for me…in some situations, but I can’t see it being anything like a panacea.

I am struggling with two main things. The first is that hearing can be mostly passive, but reading is active. It requires intent, focus, attention. I feel like if I were in a conversation with someone, focusing on the inside surface of the lenses of my glasses would be somewhat disconcerting to the person I am speaking with.

Which brings me to my second thing - how are you going to prevent people from wearing them while driving their car? Can you safely pilot a motor vehicle down the roadway while staring at text 1" away from your eyeballs?

I fully realize that I may be missing something obvious, but on the surface…

Edited

You bring up good points and I have a few answers.

You said - I feel like if I were in a conversation with someone, focusing on the inside surface of the lenses of my glasses would be somewhat disconcerting to the person I am speaking with.

Well if you’re looking at the person speaking and reading text captioning at the same time I seriously doubt anyone is going to notice irregular eye movement. Of course you can read text captioning off your cell phone, which is really disconcerting to the person speaking.

When your driving you won’t be wearing your AR glasses with speech to text due to need for full vision out of both glass lenses. Or possibly you just turn off speech to text display while behind the wheel. But alas people still text on their cell phone while driving, so there will be drivers who have glasses text display on while driving. Risky

I think the bigger questions are time delay, any limits on display verbaige, glare from sun or outside day use, etc. But what’s very encouraging is AR glasses in general seem to be in the sweet spot for general pricing, say $400 to $1500. And over time competitive pricing should come down.

In reply to @Allen

@Allen said:

I feel like if I were in a conversation with someone, focusing on the inside surface of the lenses of my glasses would be somewhat disconcerting to the person I am speaking with.

I think they would adjust the focal length of the text so it would appear a reasonable distance away.

I remember my uncle (quite a few years ago) had built into his glasses. Presumably they were bone conduction.

Has anyone studied the specification of the new Ray-Ban Meta ClubMaster glasses with ha, but without cameras. They are to be put on sale in mid October 2026 I believe

Edited

These glasses are just like the previous Meta glasses but without the cameras . None of the current Meta glasses have the hearing aid features announced last week.

The hearing aid features will be available later this year for $149.99 (also available with the Meta One subscription). The list of compatible Meta glasses has not been announced.

It sounds like this will be a software feature like it was done with the AirPods Pro .

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