Stanford Startup TranscribeGlass

Introducing TranscribeGlass, an affordable AR device that attaches to your glasses and projects real-time subtitles in front of your eyes when paired with the transcription software of your choice. The device comes from CEO and co-founder Madhav Lavakare, Yale '25, and co-founder Tom Pritsky M.S. Both students have close ties to the world of assistive technology. They pursued this idea independently before joining forces in 2021.

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Subtitles for World's First Really Affordable, Comfortable AR Smart Glasses

Pritsky, founder of Stanford's Deaf and Hard of Hearing club, has suffered from bilateral hearing loss since the age of three. And he uses hearing aids and lip-reading to communicate. He has long dreamed of the possibility of a captioning device. "I really like subtitles for movies, and I thought it would be cool to have them in real life," Pritsky said.

TranscribeGlass allows users to choose an external subtitling service, such as subtitle files from a movie theater, an automatic speech recognition service, or live human subtitling. The subtitles are then sent via Bluetooth to the hardware, which is projected into the user's field of view using augmented reality. The user can then adjust the size and position of the text to best suit their environment.

Hearing devices and cochlear implants do not work for everyone and some Deaf and Hard of Hearing people prefer to remain disabled. Those who use them cannot understand full conversations, especially in environments with a lot of background noise. So, with the availability of both augmented reality (AR) technology and live captioning, Madhav thought of combining the two using an AR display that allows the user to "look at the speakers, look at non-verbal communication cues and see the captions".

In 2020, the company was acquired by the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, a startup incubator. It also received another grant from the US and Indian governments. At TranscribeGlass, we create the world's first all-day wearable captions. You can see a recent viral video of CEO Tom Pritsky and marketing intern Desiree Lu showing what it would look like to use TranscribeGlass here.