Dear all,
I’ve tried one pair of these caption creating glasses. It’s been an absolutely fantastic experience. I am 100% deaf on my left ear ( Declines sharply in the last 15 years to hit you in 2021 ) and 60% deaf on my right ear . Wearing cutting edge hearing aids since 20 years.
Wearing these glasses was so relaxing - to be able to read people in addition to trying to hear them. I’ve decided against a CI due only 58% non regret rate. Side effects of pain, dizziness, tinnitus, etc. if I have 15% left on my right ear, I will consider it but not before.
Any help on these glasses and what is the best one so far there are at least four on the market and it’s confusing and I don’t wanna wait two years until Apple will provide an excellent product. Thank you for any input. Bea
I bought Even Realities G1B, which are probably the best glasses without a camera in the market.
Pretty expensive but they look gorgeous (and nobody even notices they’re smart glasses) and work well with captions… And that’s what really matters to me.
I’ve been watching the progress of caption reading glasses for some time and can tell you the best is yet to come. It appears Samsug will come out with Smart Glasses this year and have English to English transcription. There are a lot of Smart Glasses that will have English translation with French, Spanish, German, etc., but that doesn’t help anyone who is deaf or sturggles with power hearing aids. Samsug I think will be the first (BIG PLAYER) to offer English captionioning September on this year.
Then comes Google and Meta. Yeah Meta been out now for a couple years but glasses have not yet offered English to English captioning. Google will offer their own glasses but also will be teaming with Samsug/technology so I’m going to assume Goggle glasses in 2026 offers English captioning. Meta might come out end of this year witn English transcription but that’s still up in the air.
Lastly Apple is now in the game but I’m assumeing they won’t go live with Smart Glass captioning until 2027. Could be wrong but I’m betting all of these Big Tech companies blow away China based smart glasses as well as the small players in the U.S.
And I think all of the above will have glasses to phone connection to handle captioning. There area very view smart glasses right now that are stand alone. Many Xander and at $5,000 a poplthose glasses are way, way over priced. I’m guess Samsung glasses come out say around $800 a frame and will be offered with prescription lens/
Which one did you try? I’ve started researching this also. The Captify glasses look interesting, which I see are $699 USA right now, before prescription lenses. That’s added on, if needed.
I’ve seen a lot of ads for “Hearview Subtitle Glasses.” They’re very expensive, almost $1,000.
I hope in a few years, when there’s more competition, everything will come down in price. It’s an excellent tool for all of us who don’t yet want to take the step toward CI.
This is the model I tried in August 2023.
It was amazing as I could just sit back and read my friends rather than straining to hear them. Best when one person at a time speaks.
The android still hit rather hot quickly - less than 2 hours- and then in the car the glasses subtitles would switch off and on - may be due to changing strength of internet connection . It was one of the first models.
2026 will be “show time” for caption reading glasses. Don’t touch anything right now since Samsug, Google and Meta will all be coming out with new smart glasses end of 2025, 2026 that will blow away any caption reading glasses currently on the market. You want to buy caption reading glasses from a company with ‘deep pockets’ and not some fly buy night company that might go bankrupt in the near future. You also will want to buy from a manufacturer that offer prescription lenses and solid eight hour plus battery life. Its all coming is six months plus so just sit tight for very good things to come.
Watch and wait is great, unless you are in your 90’s like my father in law. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to have a conversation with him which is causing him to become withdrawn. Any recommendations from what is available NOW. also, simple to use for the elderly crowd.
Unfortunately current smart glasses with English to English transcription/captioning are a moving target. Hearing Tracker came out with a really good review a few months back regarding what’s currently on the market.
I’ll throw out two names but both smart glasses are not perfect.
Xander Glasses - seem to have hit the sweet spot as far as put on and go as far as glass display captioning. From what I’ve read they seem to offer a high level/percentage of display accuracy when other people talk. They also work stand alone and do no need to be connected to cell phone nor blue tooth I beleive. The negatives are they are very over priced and at $5000 and should be priced under $2000. Secondly they have lousy battery life and last I reviewd might last three to four hours before you have to recharge. Battery length might be longer if connected to cloud, but don’t hold your breath. And there might be montly fee to connect to the cloud. They also look really bulkly and might not be comfortable to wear. You have some serious glass temples on each side extending way past your ear.
The other might be XRAI AR2 which this month is coming out with new smart glass model. XRAI finally made the jump from hard line cord connection to wireless. They also look very good frame wise and are price considerably cheaper than Xander. They also have 8 hours of battery life. Where I believe they fail is in two area. One is without a cloud connection you have something like 81% caption accuracy which is not going to cut it. And I bet the 81% number is pumped higher then it should be. To improve display caption accuracy you have to pay a monthy fee of $30 a month to access the cloud. I could possible accept that but you have to read the fine print before jumping into a cloud connection. Its only for 18,000 minutes for like 30 hours of use. That’s for a period of a month. Not sure why anyone would want to pay for say two or three days of improved.captioning accuracy, then the rest of the month go back to 81% caption accuracy.
Secondly if you need prescription lens, you have to order then insert less (yourself) into the glass frames. So your actually adding a second lens that is manually inserted by pushing into glass frames. This to me sounds like a train wreck coming since the prescription lens might not fit properly, could pop out and how do you clean in between both lens. And one has to wonder if you drop your glasses could prescripton lens pop out?
Unfortunately the big players all seem to be gearing towards English to foreign language translation (French, Spanish, ,etc.) and don’t want to be bothered with English to English. Meta is coming out later this year with new glasses but I don’t think they will have a display or English to English transcription. Samsung has some announcement in September coming for new smart glasses but I don’t think they will offer a display for English to English transcription. Google seems to pushing off their smart glasses until late 2026 and no one know a thing about them. Apple now is looking at 2027 and not saying a word of what’s coming.
My suggestion to you is try to hold off buying anything until CES convention in early January, 2026. That’s when you’ll be able to see or hopefully trial new smart glasses to hopefully hit the market. But waiting game is a royal pain in the kazoo, and to be honest the smaller (riskier) smart phone companies seem to be offering more hope to the deaf and hearing imparied than the big tech companies.
Also critical (I believe) is that both glass lenses show captioning. It appears when just one lens is used for display captioning, it can strain the users eyes, cause headaches, etc. When I googled I found this. Note when wearing smart glasses with a single, one-eye display (monocular) with captioning can cause headaches and eye strain for some users.
Unfortunately right now I’m not sure how many smart glasses currently caption both lenses. The one negative I see using both lenses to transcribe English or general translation is that the user will then have his over all vision diminished when wearing glasses for things like eating, walking, watching T.V. Unless lens captioning can be located to the side or above or below normal glass viewing. All tricky.
Maybe for English to foreign language translation. The English to English transcription has to be manually set and there are numerous reports of lag time, as in real-time transcription can be slow or lag behind in continuous conversations. This is with the basic service. And I doubt anyone here can afford the costly faster connection. Copied off chat board.
The translation costs are completely disconnected from reality. $20 for just 200 minutes of translation? That’s 10 cents PER MINUTE to use the feature they showcase in every demo video. And there’s no unlimited option or proper plan either - just increasingly expensive bundles that still limit your usage.
What makes it worse is that the other features are thoroughly underwhelming. The spatial computing is laggy, the field of view is narrower than advertised and the battery barely lasts 3 hours with normal use. Nothing about these glasses justifies the $700 price tag, and without affordable translation, they’re essentially expensive sunglasses with a HUD.