The Captify Pro smart glasses are designed around a simple promise: Delivering real-time captions and optional translations directly in your field of view without the complexity of a full-featured smart glasses platform. They handle this core function well enough to be genuinely useful in conversations, meetings, or media playback, and their minimalist design keeps both setup and daily use straightforward. However, that focus on simplicity also defines their limits—there's no navigation, AI assistant, or broader smart functionality, and at $899, they sit in a competitive space where more versatile options exist. As a result, the Captify Pro feels less like a complete smart glasses ecosystem and more like a highly specialized tool, one that works as intended but may be too narrowly focused for its price.

Design: Normal Glasses, With a Subtle Tech Twist

The Captify Pro looks almost like regular spectacles, with simple, thin black plastic frames surrounding rectangular lenses. The endpieces (the upper corners where the hinges attach) are bigger than they would typically be on such narrow frames, but they could pass as an affectation rather than a bulky casing for microprojectors. The resulting look sits squarely between the almost inconspicuous Even G2 and the very noticeable bulk of the Meta Ray-Ben Display.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The temples are mounted on spring hinges and look unassuming. The only telltale signs of the electronics hidden in the temples are a single power button, a four-contact connector, pinhole microphones, and thin speaker grille slits. Two tiny dots and a line are molded into the right temple's outward face to indicate the touch strip, but like the endpieces, those bumps could easily be seen as an aesthetic quirk.

On their own, the lenses are flat and clear, with rectangular waveguides etched into rectangular sections near the top. If you need corrective lenses, you can order the glasses with either clear lenses or, for an additional $100, blue-light-filtering inserts. The inserts come preinstalled and sit directly on top of the main lenses, but easily snap on and off. No tints are available, but you can order a separate brown or black clip-on sunshade for $50.

The Captify Pro's prescription lens support is impressively diverse. Single-vision inserts start at $99 for 1.60 index lenses, $200 for 1.67 index lenses, and $300 for 1.74 index lenses. You can also get standard reading glasses for the same price as single-vision lenses, progressive lenses in the same indices as single-vision and reading, starting at $200, $300, and $400. Need bifocals? You can buy them in a clear, 1.50 index for $200 and a 1.60 index for $300. Captify makes inserts, with corrections ranging from -20.00 to +6.00.

As a pair of waveguide smart glasses, the Captify Pro uses tiny projectors that shine light through the lenses' edges, which are then redirected to the eyes via tiny, etched patterns. The glasses use a monochrome green waveguide display with a 640-by-480 resolution, a 30-degree field of view, and a peak brightness of 1,500 nits. It's sharp and easy to read indoors. However, the image can take a hit if you look at a light-colored object, such as a white wall or the sky, while using the glasses outside on a sunny day.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

According to Captify, the glasses can last up to four hours of continuous use or 20 hours in standby mode. That's subpar compared with the $599 Even Realities G2, which can comfortably last the day with regular use. It would've been nice if Captify included a charging case like Even Realities does with the G2, or at least a cradle to keep the glasses powered up without having to attach the charging dongle. 

Controls and Software: Simple at the Glasses Level, Clunkier in the App

Using the Captify Pro is simpler than using more general-use waveguide smart glasses. The spectacles have a very limited interface, offering Transcribe and Settings as big tiles in the middle of the display when you press the button. Transcribe activates the selected transcription mode, either live-captioning the language being spoken or translating that language with subtitles. Settings lets you check the glasses' information (such as the firmware version) and choose one of five languages for captioning (English, Spanish, Japanese, and Simplified or Traditional Chinese). In short, you'll mostly press a button, select Transcribe, and tap the touch strip to start captioning. 

(Credit: Captify/PCMag)

Setting up and configuring the glasses is performed through the Captify app for Android and iOS. It walks you through pairing the glasses with your phone, updates the firmware, and lets you adjust various options, including multiple display settings, such as manual and automatic brightness, text size, text position, screen timeout when it's not translating, and even a single-eye mode that only shows captions on your left or right eye instead of both. 

You can choose between an offline-only mode; more powerful, accurate cloud-assisted processing; or an automatic mode that switches to offline when your phone can't access the servers. This is a welcome addition, since you don't always know whether you'll have a consistent network connection.

The app is also where you choose between straight captioning and translation. It expands the Captify Pro's capabilities, with 30 captioning and 20 translation language options, including multiple English, German, and Spanish dialects. If you want Basque, Hungarian, Icelandic, or Vietnamese, the glasses can do it. You have to manually set the translation languages, though, which is a bit of a pain because the lists are so long and scrolling through them is tedious. A memory feature that puts your most commonly used languages at the top of the list would have been nice, or even a shortcut button for common modes. Automatic language detection is not currently in the cards.

Speaking of captioning and translation, switching between the two is a bit awkward. Instead of two separate modes, both fall under the same Transcribe mode. You must tap the language icon and toggle on the real-time translation setting. When it's activated, you can select two languages. When it's off, captioning is enabled, and you can only select one language. Given that they're the glasses' two distinct uses, the options should have been front and center rather than tucked away in a settings menu.

(Credit: Captify/PCMag)

Despite the clunky translation options, the Captify Pro is incredibly easy to use if you primarily want closed captioning and not translation. Without changing anything in the app, all you have to do is turn on the glasses and tap Transcribe to start captioning. As long as the app is running on your phone and the glasses are connected, whatever you hear will be shown before your eyes.

All of Captify's captioning and translation functions are free, including identification of more than 300 non-speech sounds and full transcription. The company is planning to launch a $15-per-month Captify Premium subscription that adds AI features, but they weren’t available at the time of testing. Automatic language recognition won't be part of it, but the subscription will add tech that can identify individual speakers, generate AI summaries of conversations, provide more accurate captions and translations, let you teach the glasses custom words, and an AI assistant that can scan your conversations to find information and answer questions.

Performance: Accurate Captions and Usable Translations

I tested the Captify Pro's captioning and translation functions through a combination of in-person conversations, listening to presentations, and watching English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-language Star Trek. The direct English captioning was mostly very accurate, though it depended heavily on the speaker's enunciation and the amount of background noise. A bar above the captions separately showed other noises around me, such as music or the sound of my typing, with fairly reliable accuracy. 

(Credit: Captify/PCMag)

Generally, I found it quite reliable, providing a readable version of what was said to me. Its visual presentation could be better, though; captioned speech is transcribed into a plain block of text that scrolls across the glasses' display, breaking only when there is a distinct pause in speed. This means conversations can appear as entire paragraphs, regardless of who's speaking. The speaker identification feature in Captify's upcoming premium subscription might fix this, but that would mean an extra $15 per month. The Even Realities G2's transcription function already does this without a monthly fee. Ideally, Captify could update the glasses' firmware to display line breaks between spoken sentences more clearly. As it is, expect the captioning to occasionally get jumbled when several people speak at once.

Translation worked pretty well when watching That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime in Japanese and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in Spanish. Both were accurate, with the typical handful of misheard words or misunderstood context. The English output for both didn't always read like natural speech and could be a bit confusing, but it was close enough to the material to follow, either way. The Spanish translation displayed smoothly, while the Japanese translation regularly flickered between multiple translations of each sentence before settling on a final one. This isn't too surprising; I saw similar performance with the Even Realities G2 and the $599 Rokid Glasses. It's a visual nuisance, but not an experience-destroying one.

(Credit: Captify/PCMag)

Generally, cloud-based processing works much better than offline processing, especially with translations. Captions were prone to more errors when offline, but translations often came out downright confusing, with both wrong words and baffling grammar.

For both captioning and translating, the Captify app records transcriptions of whatever runs through the glasses. This is helpful if you want to dissect a translation to make sure it’s accurate, or just want to keep a record of what you hear. Still, any word that's misheard or misunderstood will be written down incorrectly, so there’s no real way to find transcription errors after the fact.