
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.
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.