Meet TranscribeGlass, an affordable AR device that attaches to your glasses and, paired with your transcription software of choice, projects real-time captions in front of your eyes.
The device comes from CEO and co-founder Madhav Lavakare, Yale ’25, and co-founder Tom Pritsky M.S. ’23. Both students have close ties to the world of assistive tech and independently pursued the idea before joining forces in 2021.
How does it work?
TranscribeGlass allows users to choose an external captioning service such as caption files from a movie theater, an automatic speech recognition service or live human captioning. The captions are then sent via Bluetooth to the hardware, which projects them in the user’s field of view using augmented reality. The user can then adjust the size and location of the text to best fit their environment.
What is the benefit over traditional captioning services?
Traditional captioning services such as Otter.ai and Google’s Live Transcribe are more affordable, but they require the user to look away from the speaker to read from a phone or computer screen.
What has been the feedback from users?
Feedback from users has been a crucial part of their design process from the beginning. Over the course of their five prototype iterations, the company has had at least 300 people test their product.
When will the TranscribeGlass Beta be available?
The company recently began manufacturing its first 150 preorders, with hopes to finish shipping them in the next few months. The TranscribeGlass Beta is being sold for $55, with the final version expected to land around $95.
