(Credit: Xander / Jon Kalish / Jeffrey Hazelwood)
My wife Pamela has had profound hearing loss since she had measles at the age of three. In high school, she got hearing aids, and at the age of 57, she got a cochlear implant for one ear. Her hearing has made miraculous strides over the years, but she still struggles at times to understand human speech.
As her "tech guy," I informed her about captioning glasses after watching an Instagram video of a young deaf girl using a pair. “Oh, my God," the girl said repeatedly. I got choked up.
A hearing consultant I've written about introduced me to the couple behind Xander Captioning Glasses (XanderGlasses), and they were willing to lend me a pair for Pamela to road test. These glasses translate speech to text in real time and project captions of conversations to the wearer's field of view.
These aren't traditional smart glasses you'd pick up on Amazon or at Best Buy. According to Xander CEO Alex Westner, "XanderGlasses are not designed for the mainstream tech audience. They're early-stage assistive devices intended for a specific population—often older adults facing social isolation due to severe hearing loss."
They're priced as such. You can order them on Xander's website for $4,999 with a $499 deposit. Delivery is expected within three to six weeks of ordering, though Xander says it's currently working through a temporary backlog. All new customers get a 45-minute onboarding session to walk them through all the features.
'Like Watching Captions on TV'
When I got my hands on the XanderGlasses, Pamela put them through their paces, and I took notes. Neon green text appeared after booting up with a long-press of the button on the right arm of the glasses. She saw a greeting screen that said: Hi; I’m Xander I’ll help you “hear.”
“It seems to caption speech immediately,” Pamela observed. “Basically, it's pretty accurate. It's kind of like watching captions on TV. It makes some mistakes. But the mistakes it makes, you can get from the context.”
This brought back memories of a listserv focused on captioning that Pamela and I belonged to when the web was young. I chuckled when I read posts by deaf people who were outraged by a botched transcription of TV dialogue.
On its website, Xander says its captions have an accuracy rate of between 85% and 95%. In quiet rooms where a one-on-one conversation is taking place, it's at the higher end of that range. The company says that its transcriptions “are about as accurate as the more advanced speech-to-text technologies available.” But one thing people who dictate texts or emails on their phone will appreciate is that you don’t have to dictate punctuation. The glasses know where to put periods, question marks, and commas.
Xander’s glasses are unique in that they’re the only smart glasses on the market that don’t require a smartphone or a cellular/Wi-Fi connection. The company says that later this year, a Wi-Fi connection will increase accuracy, but that feature is currently in beta.
XanderGlasses do not require a subscription. Rival devices that do (like the $700 Hearview Subtitle Glasses with a $10-per-month plan) say those fees are justified because the accuracy of their product’s transcription is superior. Westner argues that most transcribing glasses just use cloud services from four companies: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Deepgram.
The only time it’s essential to connect your Xander glasses to a smartphone or the cloud is to download updated software and to use the Xander app to customize the captions.
You can control caption size, brightness, and where to position them on the lenses. There are three sizes of text and four degrees of brightness. Captions can be positioned across the entire field of vision on the top, bottom, or on either side. Xander’s captions are binocular, which is to say they appear on both lenses.
(Credit: Jon Kalish)There’s a control in the app for a shutdown timeout. Options include 15 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour, or never. You can also shut down the device with a voice command.
We had to test the setting to filter profanity, which Pamela told me did not work after I declared, “I don't give a @#$% about profanity.”
A USB-C jack on the left arm charges the glasses, which can run for three hours. It takes about two hours for the glasses to completely recharge.
The USB-C jack is also used for a wireless receiver that’s less than 2 inches long. A couple of clip-on wireless microphones are included for use, say, in noisy restaurants. The wireless mics have a range of 65 feet, which would be handy in some lecture situations.
'Benvenuti a Roma'
We put the glasses into translation mode, selecting one of the 14 or so languages the unit can handle. (There are seven varieties of English, including Australian and Canadian, as well as two flavors of French and two versions of Portuguese.) Because Pamela spent part of her undergraduate education in Italy, we chose Italian.
"It’s like watching a foreign film,” she remarked as the Italian text started appearing on the screen. “You could learn Italian from this.”
As soon as I said, "Welcome to Rome, the text "benvenuti a Roma" appeared on the lenses.
“I worked with a guy named Ben Venuti,” I joked.
I asked my wife if the captions interfered with her ability to look at me while we spoke. Did she feel a need to look at me as we were talking?
“As far as understanding goes, I don't feel that I need to be looking at you,” she said. “I do [look at you] to get cues from your facial expression as to your mood, but during a phone conversation, you're not looking at the person you’re speaking to. So, I can do without the facial expressions.”
Some Points to Consider
Pamela’s road test of the Xander glasses did include some frustrating freezes of the device and the app used to control its settings. Westner told me that using the cloud connection setting while it’s still in beta mode is likely responsible. Some of the 77 members of Xander’s Facebook page have shared similar frustrations.
"I'm willing to work through all the settings, but when it keeps freezing while I'm trying to do this, it's not giving me a good impression," Pamela said. "I don't think they're quite there yet.”
Xander’s glasses have also been described as “chunky.” They weigh 4.6 ounces, more than twice as heavy as their competitors. "They’re kind of heavy on my nose," Pamela remarked.
(Credit: Jon Kalish)The thickness of the glasses’ arms ranges from 1/3 to 1/2 inches. But inside those arms is a lot of processing power, enough to handle transcription without the cloud or smartphone connection. Consequently, the left arm of the glasses gets warm after a while, so "I wouldn't want to wear this for extremely long periods of time," Pamela said.
My wife also wears eyeglasses with progressive lenses, and not all progressive prescriptions can be reproduced on the Xander lenses. Xander can order custom lenses for some progressive prescriptions to accommodate the distance portion of the prescription and then provide stick-on magnifiers for the inside of the Xander lenses. This creates a bi-focal effect, enabling users to read smaller print while wearing the device.
Pamela used the Xander glasses without her eyeglasses on and was able to read the captions, though they were a bit blurry.
'A Miraculous Breakthrough'
Still, the technology is impressive, especially considering how far it's come. When Pamela got her cochlear implant in 2009, I sat with her at the NYU Cochlear Implant Center the day her audiologist turned it on three weeks after the surgery. As we watched the audiologist’s computer monitor display a colorful graphic representation of the electrodes connected to Pamela’s auditory nerve firing up as it registered different frequencies, a line from Paul Simon’s 1986 song "The Boy in the Bubble" came to mind: "These are the days of miracle and wonder."
The cochlear implant opened up a whole new world of sound for her. She was startled by the flare of a wooden kitchen match used to light candles and perplexed by the sound of the air brakes on trucks outside our loft building.
On rare occasions, cochlear implants don’t help people with profound hearing loss. A Navy veteran in Florida consulted Pamela on the experience, and when it was turned on after the surgery, it didn’t help. We told her that the Department of Veterans Affairs is now paying for Xander glasses to help veterans with hearing loss.
So, all in all, how does Pamela Kalish rate the Xander captioning glasses?
“I think they're a miraculous breakthrough,” she said.
Like the song says, "These are the days of miracle and wonder."