These glasses could change the lives of deaf and hard of hearing people

One of the first major trends at CES 2025, the major Las Vegas show dedicated to innovation, is undoubtedly connected glasses. Long shunned by consumers, this segment has been greatly popularized by Meta Ray-Ban, Facebook’s glasses released in 2023. Many manufacturers are announcing increasingly versatile products at CES, often with functions that no one really asked for. .

In the middle of this gadget fair, one start-up particularly caught our attention: Captify. Its proposal goes back to the basics of innovation, with a product designed for a single goal, but potentially revolutionary for many: subtitling the world for deaf and hard of hearing people.

Green subtitles in the middle of the vision

Captify is not the first to have imagined glasses capable of subtitling reality, but its approach is very convincing.

Its product, which will be marketed between March and April after a visit to Kickstarter, looks like normal glasses. There is no module to clip on to add the connected part: the glasses have transparent screens.

When you wear the glasses and someone speaks, the audio is transcribed on the screen with a latency of 2 to 3 seconds. The field of view is strangely very correct, with green subtitles taking up the entire width. We were impressed by our test, despite sometimes difficult vision with the screens too close.

With its glasses, Captify is primarily targeting people who cannot hear well, even if a translation mode gives the glasses greater potential. The product was designed by Tom Pritsky, a young entrepreneur who himself wears a hearing aid. “I designed it for myself first”he explains to Numerama. Tom Pritsky has designed various prototypes of teleprompter glasses, but this latest version is close to what he always imagined.

Among the advantages of Captify glasses: they use transcription models from Google or Microsoft to convert voice into text. A choice that allows them to recognize more than 40 languages, including French.

At launch, Captify plans to sell its glasses, which use expensive technology, for $599. Prescription lenses will be available for people who need correction. Their battery life is around two hours with the screen on, but the glasses are designed to turn off when you are not chatting. They then recharge with a magnetic port.

Based on our first visit to CES, other startups seem to have similar ideas in their pipeline. The Captify story caught our attention thanks to the sincerity of its founder, who reminds us how new technologies can improve lives.