Hi all,
I currently just received my order from Captify. I’m excited to try these out in the wild and report back over the coming weeks. For those who are unaware these are glasses that display captions of the words being said live. The founder is a HOH individual who developed these out of his own need. I have no affiliation with Captify, but am cautiously optimistic about this new technology.
. Just wanted to start this thread now as a placeholder.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
Firstly I picked up these glasses to help with work meetings mainly. With my reverse slope heading loss, some low spoken men will just never come through clearly consistently and it can be frustrating when at noisy conferences and meetings. The glasss have a two week trial (15 days) so I will try to put them through the wringer to determine if they will stay or go. As the glassss literally just came out (I believe I have one of the first shipments of the pro model), I am fully expecting there to be bugs and glitches and hopefully firmware updates to come. The glasses only do captions and some language translation and that is exactly what I want - not looking for smart glasses just hoping for help with conversations.
Some very initial and random observations…
The captions are displayed as if you have a personal heads up display. The app is a little buggy. You can switch the microphone from the glass’s mics to your phone mic which is recommended is very noisy environments. When switching the captions stopped and I had to restart the app and shut down and restart the glasses.
The glasses do a good job of captioning my own voice. Since the app can store your captions for future reference, this can be handy to look back at, but to me it clutters the captions of the person I want to hear. I posted about this on the company forum and they said possibly could be addressed with a future firmware update but who knows.
Captioning my two daughters at home in quiet is very accurate and hardly any delay. When noise was introduced (noisy robot vacuum), the glasses didn’t pickup my daughters’ voices at all. That was with the glasses” mics so will have to retry with the phone mics another time.
Glasses can also be used as headphones and play sound from your phone calls or media through the speakers. The glasses can then caption these calls or media but I found that the captioning via this method is very delayed and inconsistent. Not my primary use at all so not a dealbreaker for me.
From a comfort standpoint, they are light. They came with 3 different notepad’s to try and look decent enough to wear. The captions can be turned on by pressing a button on the right arm underside. The charging is fast.
They work with your vision prescription- i had them make inserts so as my vision changes, the glasses can be easily updated.
Will update more in the coming days. Have a birthday dinnner for my wife on Friday and hoping to out these guys through a nice workout and report back.
Inserts - how do people even know about this stuff?? I wasn’t even given an option for lens type when I had catarct surgery. Later I learned there were options. Anyway, good look and let us know. I’m just using the Google Live Caption for now.
You say that phone calls are captioned. Do the glasses caption when the phone is streaming directly into hearing aids?
Do you know when they will be available on the market?
I haven’t yet tried that
They’re for sale on captify’s website
More random and mostly uneventful observations.
The glasses seem to understand men better than women. This what the founder told me when I spoke with him before I purchased, but also what I’ve seen somewhat observationally. They pickup men through the TV speakers quite good when sitting about 8 feet in front.
The captions are buggy at times. I noticed it’ll stop picking up the voices then all the sudden catch up what it missed and restart captioning. Not great but also kind of expected.
My kids made me try to say and bad words to see what it does. It does *** the bad word out and doesn’t caption, kind of funny.
The captions all get displayed together in one big paragraph. So it captions my voice, my wife, the TV, my kids, whoever is speaking into a bit paragraph. This is not optimal and somewhat hard to pick out who said what.
The other person can see the green reflection on the lenses and so the captions are not discrete in that sense.
Btw- I paid $848 back in April for the glasses. They gave early orders the option to upgrade for free to the pro version which began shipping late July- this is what I’m wearing.
Be careful and do your home work. The Captify video is very enticing in what it might offer and I do have to admit it seems to cover the bases on what deaf or severely hearing impaired might want. I give the developer points for trying to produce what many of us might want. But there are warning signs here.
Just one or two years ago there was a caption reading glass called ‘Transcribe Glass’. It got quite a bit of attention and then it died on the vine. There was a exterior attachment part that you attached to your outer glass frame to try to read what people were saying. Unfortunatley it didn’t work and didn’t sell. Then in late 2023, early 2024 Transcribe glasses changed their name to Captify. Though we talking different glass products between the previous company and Captify that a little unsetteling to me. Secondly as the original poster pointed out I don’t believe the current glasses offer good accurancy when captioning what others are saying. The original posters claims they are 'buggy" which is a bad sign. And to be honest who in heck wants to read on their glass captioning display what they are talking? I seriously think there could be brain over-load if users of smart glasses have to not only read what others are saying one on one or in groups, but also read what the smart glass wearing is saying.
I would hold off testing these glasses until there are more reivews to read. Also 3 1/2 hours of battery power is not ideal. Hopefully over time Captify improves their smart glass performance.
I’ve been considering the Even Realities G1 but these are very interesting. Any idea if you can install Mentra Captions | Real-Time AI Captions for Smart AR Glasses onto them? They seem to caption better than most other glasses.
The other big thing is Meta is heavily rumored to be adding lenses to their next release.
What about the available languages? Only English, or…?
“We will support 13 languages on launch, and will eventually cover 40 languages. The current list of languages include: English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Turkish, and Thai.”
The underlying speech recognition/translation model is from Microsoft and they support dozens of Lansbury so hopefully more can be rolled out quickly.
Future language translation glasses certainly will be a game changer. Though I hope you understand your posting on a chat board that deals with people with hearing loss that they have to deal with. Which means English to English transcription ranks way higher for those with a serious hearing loss or deaf versus English to what ever foreign langangue translation smart glasses might offer. Both are important but we’re not seeing enough English to English captioning glasses on the market for those who need hearing/reading assistance.
Would you ask the founder to join this forum, it would be great to see more people like this.
I don’t have any personal connection to him. I only spoke with him as a customer in the early stages when I had some questions to ask before making the purchase.
You can write Captify directly, but of course you will get more accurate and truthful info off the net and be able to read reviews by other glass testers. Question to you is why would you be interested in Captify transcription glasses that have a serious captioning delay and as the first poster said “are buggy”?
More observations. Watching a YouTube video with Captify glasses. The app is captioning relatively quickly but the glasses are way behind. Seems to be a disconnect between the app and glasses when captioning streaming audio/video
Yesterday I watched a movie in my tv while wearing the glssses and turned off the tv closed captions. The glasses did a good job helping me fill in the blanks when I missed a word or three during the dialogue
Also yesterday when opening the app, it said I am getting 3 months of premium app features? I’m not sure what that means as the app is basic and I was under impression they would not be charging a subscription for captioning services.
Don’t want to be the bearer of bad news but I believe Captify is under heavy financial pressure. They spent a lot of time and money developing the Transcribe Glasses and that failed. Now I feel the company is over leveraged and promising things they might not be able to produce. Don’t get me wrong because I give credit to any start-up company that can help the severely hearing imparied to benefit from caption reading smart glasses. Problem is what you might see and read on a company website or video might be completely different to what you get when you open your ordered glasses. My gut tells me any new glasses that come out need to be tested by independent parties for at least six months before I consider buying.
Used them last night at dinner in a noisy Korean bbq restaurant. Sizzling grills and packed place. The glasses were buggy and almost useless for most the night. They would caption then stop, then catch up on the missed captions. I spent a lot of time fiddling with the app and the glasses and it was not a great experience. There were four of us in a small square table. Everyone was seated close and i was hoping the glasses would help. There were a couple of occasions that it worked and helped me catch a word that I missed, but overall it seems the tech isn’t where it needs to be yet. This is a great idea and really hope these guys continue to develop the technology with firmware updates and better hardware, but I will likely be returning my pair during the trial before it expires based on my current experience.