(Credit: Will Greenwald)
LAS VEGAS—If you have trouble hearing, a solution could soon appear right in front of your eyes. Smart glasses that show you live captions for the person you're talking to are on the way, as promised by Captify at CES 2025.
Meant specifically for the hard of hearing, the Captify glasses create closed captions from the audio they pick up with dual beamforming microphones, focusing directly on the person in front of you while cutting out any surrounding chatter. The speech is transcribed by your phone, which is connected to the glasses over Bluetooth, and the resulting transcription is projected in front of your eyes in glowing green text only you can see.
(Credit: Solaire Inc.)I tried out the glasses and was impressed by just how simple and intuitive they are to use. You simply put them on and you can read whatever is being said to you. The transcription seemed very quick, and while some stray words from the crowded event came through, most of the captions I read seemed very accurate. The projected display was also bright and crisp, at least when I wore my own glasses at the same time (prescription lenses will be available with the final product).
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The Captify glasses can translate speech as well, with support for 40 different languages. It's a natural extension of the closed captioning function; once the audio has been transcribed into text, putting that text through a translation tool before displaying it is a simple process. Whether translated or not, the glasses can record all of their transcriptions to the app on your phone to review later. While translations require an internet connection, the glasses can generate captions even when your phone is offline.
This idea isn't unique to Captify. More general smart glasses like the Even Realities G1, Rokid Glasses, and RayNeo X3 all offer some form of translation feature in addition to broader functions like providing information and your surroundings and even taking photos. I tried all three other pairs at the show, and they offered similar experiences in terms of showing me the words of whoever I was talking to. They each seemed to work quite well, but they had much more complex interfaces to select and use their additional features. That said, the whole appeal of the Captify glasses is that they only do one thing—just because you're hard of hearing doesn't mean you want a pair of smart glasses that double as a computer monitor.
The Capitfy glasses are available to pre-order at an early price of $599 with a planned retail price of $899 and are scheduled to start shipping in April.