captioning-glasses
(3)
AirCaps
AirCaps builds lightweight AR smart glasses that display real-time captions, translate 60+ languages, and take AI meeting notes directly in your field of view. Founded by Yale and Cornell computer scientists who have been building on smart glasses since age 13, the company started with the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community and expanded to travelers, language learners, and professionals. The 49-gram glasses run a 4-microphone beamforming array, claim 97% caption accuracy at roughly 300ms latency, and sell for $599 with a free-forever tier.
Xander
Xander builds XanderGlasses, standalone augmented-reality smart glasses that turn spoken conversation into real-time captions displayed in the wearer's field of view. Aimed at people with hearing loss who don't sign, the device runs speech-to-text offline - no phone, Wi-Fi, or cloud required - so private conversations stay private. An MIT Media Lab spinout founded by Alex and Marilyn Morgan Westner, Xander has been adopted by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and is built on customized Vuzix Shield hardware.
Alex Westner
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.