Startup company XRAI Glass has unveiled its first product, the XRAI Glasses, which is being called a game changer for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals.
What was the inspiration behind the glasses?
The company’s CEO, Dan Scarfe, conceived of the glasses after the previous year’s Christmas, spending it with his family, including his 97-year-old hard-of-hearing grandfather. Scarfe noticed his grandfather struggling to engage in conversations with the rest of the family in real-time and that “it’s got to the point now where he literally just sits in silence.”
Scarfe thought to himself that his grandfather always watches TV with subtitles, planting the idea to “subtitle the world” for him and others. Six months later, his company XRAI Glass had partnered with Nreal, a manufacturer of AR glasses, to reveal the XRAI Glasses.
How do the XRAI Glasses work?
The glasses are connected to a mobile phone that will process the required information and create the graphics to be displayed and used to create and display a speech transcription from nearby people using Amazon’s Alexa transcription service.
“What our software effectively does is it takes an audio feed from the microphone on these glasses [and] sends it down to the phone. On the phone we are effectively turning that audio into closed captions and then, using that Nreal software, we can project those subtitles into the real-world,” said Scarfe.
When are the glasses expected to be released?
They are going with a small number to begin with to prove it out, to get the feedback, to understand what people like, what they don’t like, [and] rapidly innovate on that. And then they will reach general availability by September.
