
At a conference in Japan, a veteran hardware engineer discovered what exclusion sounds like. His answer was Wordly - software designed to let every listener choose the language of the room.
You may know the speaker. You probably do not know the company inside the dashboard. HARMAN has spent seven decades turning sound science into a sprawling business across homes, stages and more than 50 million vehicles.
Alex Westner is the co-founder and CEO of Xander, a Raleigh-based startup building AR smart glasses that print live captions of in-person conversations directly into the wearer's field of view. An MIT Media Lab-trained audio engineer who spent nearly two decades shipping sound software (including the Emmy-winning iZotope RX, nicknamed the Photoshop for Sound), Westner now turns his obsession with the cocktail party problem into a self-contained, no-cloud, no-phone device that helps people follow conversations they can no longer fully hear.