Student Startup Develops IRL Closed Captioning Glasses for the Hearing Impaired

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Student Startup Develops IRL Closed Captioning Glasses for the Hearing Impaired

At PC Gamer, we're all about accessible technology. Anything that makes us feel less alone after all these years is welcome. So it's no wonder that Tom Pritsky's little AR device that transcribes your conversations in real time has gone viral on TikTok. Realistic closed captioning.

Pritsky, along with co-founder Madhav Lavacare, founded TranscribeGlass in 2021.

TranscribeGlass touts the same features that Google Glass once tried to bring us, but instead adds a small augmented reality (AR) attachment next to regular glasses that not only transcribes the words spoken by the person in front of you Not only does it successfully transcribe, but it also skillfully ignores surrounding conversations that could potentially confuse the transcriber.

Pritzky's goal is audacious: "to solve hearing loss." He is the founder of "Stanford University's first club dedicated to hearing loss advocacy," and it is clear that his passion for technology has grown with his efforts throughout his degree and now converges here with TranscribeGlass.

According to Jason Carman of Saturday Startup Stories, he says, "Even if you give someone the perfect hearing aid, a broken hearing system can't resolve that speech and it sounds super blurry and incomprehensible."

His and Lavakare's design avoids this problem entirely, displaying a transcription next to the screen so the wearer can focus on the conversation.

The screen size is a bit small, and long words are split into two lines. It would be nice to eventually be able to change the font style.

What's really cool about this project is that it can be integrated into anything. Our goal is to be source agnostic," Pritsky said. We can integrate with any API: Google Speech, Deepgram, Microsoft, etc."

Open source and very accessible, the final model is expected to cost about $95.

If you are the kind of person who gets excited about things like tactile suits that allow deaf concert-goers to experience music, this is certainly something to watch.

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