Captioning Glasses e.g. XRAI - State of market as of Jan '26

I purchased Xrai caption glasses about three weeks ago. I have been very hard of hearing for many years and am very elderly. At my last visit my aud said new HA’s wouldn’t help much and I should consider a CI. At my age I am not interested. I am long retired and hang out with my wife. I can understand her if I am face to face two or three feet in front. I still don’t get things right. I haven’t been able to hear my Panasonic landline phone for hard of hearing even on speaker phone lately and can’t hear a cell phone at all. My wife goes to the Dr with me to make sure I understand things. I can’t understand anyone at our small dinner table or conversations with family in the living room.

My communication relies on captions. I have a Captel landline caption phone which is amazing. Everything I watch on TV is captioned because I can’t understand dialog at all without captions. I have tried phone captions like Live Listen on my older iPhone but it was very frustrating.

Recently I stumbled upon the Xrai app and it worked very well for one on one or two people conversations and I could read my wife and understand things even from 15’ behind her or in an adjoining room. I had been looking at caption glasses for about a year but figured I should wait for them to develop, I finally decided to give the Xrai AR2 a trial. I expected to return them. Here is my impressions so far.

It was a bit of a struggle for me to get the glasses in the caption mode but once I did they do a great job pulling words out of the air. The mics are very impressive and they accuracy is amazing. The are two modes: the basic mode uses an Apple engine on the phone to process the sounds into captions, and the advanced mode uses the Cloud which costs a couple dollars an hour I think. It supposedly is more accurate and has speaker ID which works well but I find the Basic mode works very well. I have not used the Cloud mode much except to check out the speaker identification.

The captions appear in space as if they are projected on a screen. If you are up close they fit on a persons face. They get larger as the background is further way. When I have a face to face conversation and am looking at a persons face I have to switch my gaze from face to captions and back like with captions on TV. Lip reading isn’t possible for me even though the delay is short.

They work very well when I am riding as a passenger in a car. Previously I could hear very little at highway speeds. With the glasses I could follow four people speaking more or less one at a time. I had a steady gaze at what looked like a billboard moving down the road in front of me. It is the first time in years I have followed a conversation in a car. I would not recommend wearing them as the driver however.

They work well if the phone is on speaking phone and I am sitting back reading them on a wall or ceiling.

They work fine if I am speaking to my wife even if we are in a different room but I don’t usually wear them at home and revert to the face to face lip reading hearing mode because I am often in and out of the house working in the garden and such.

They work at the dinner table with say four people. I am sure they would work well at a Dr. visit. They work very well helping me hear speech from my soft spoken granddaughters if it is one on one in a quiet space.

Where they have a much more difficult time is in a larger group of people such as at a recent Easter family dinner and get together where multiple conversations are going on at one. Words are appearing quicker than I can read or comprehend them and it is a word jumble.

I have only had them for three weeks but my sense is they work well on one on one and sometimes on two or three people conversations if only one person talks at a time and the speaker is talking slowly enough that I can read. It is very much like captions on a TV. A steady gaze on the speaker helps. I think they would be very good in a classroom mode if I were a teacher and called on a student. The app is very good at pulling speech from noise.

Support from Xrai has been really great. I think there is continuous development on the app. I think they are working on increasing the directionality of the mics via software which may help differentiate speakers and also on not captioning the users own voice. And as I use them more I will get better at processing.

Right now for me they are another kit in my hearing toolbox.

I should mention in closing that the glasses are very nice and quite comfortable. The battery lasts longer than I do and much longer than my iPhone 16e. The case is very nice with magnetic drop in charging for many cycles.