For all the advancements that tech has made, comparatively little has been done for those who need help the most. But Madhav Lavakare is an exception. When Lavakare was in high school, a deaf friend of his dropped out because the regular environment wasn’t accessible enough for him. Lavakare, then had the ingenuous idea to make a device that would help his friend and others who were similarly impaired communicate with ease. He started to develop affordable “hearing glasses” that would allow users to read the transcriptions of daily conversations around them, called TranscribeGlass.
Lavakare, a Yale student, was reportedly inspired by the now-halted Google Glass project, but unlike Google’s device, Lavakare was intent on sticking to a low price point. “The majority of people who can use hearing aids simply don’t use them due to a myriad of factors, one of which is cost; with the lower range starting around three thousand dollars,” he said to an interview with Stanford Daily. Cochlear implants, which require invasive surgery are even more expensive. (Interestingly, Google Glass’ USD 1,500 a unit price was a big contributor to its low sales)
Lavakare’s efforts were initially encouraged by India’s National Association of the Deaf in community meetups. In 2020, TranscribeGlass was incubated by IIT Delhi, and received a grant from both US and Indian governments. But even as the project picked up traction, for a young 18-year-old, it was an uphill task to bring in investors and build a team, all by himself.
In 2021, Tom Pritsky, a research assistant at the Stanford School of Medicine joined Lavakare as co-founder of the company. Pritsky, who has been suffering from bilateral hearing loss from the age of three, founded Stanford’s club for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
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A couple days ago, Pritsky demonstrated in a video how TranscribeGlass works, which garnered millions of views on TikTok and started getting attention on microblogging platform, X. Pritsky went on to call the glasses - “subtitles for real life.”
TranscribeGlass allows users to choose between different options in different settings like caption files from a movie theatre, automatic speech recognition or live human captioning. The caption files are then sent to the hardware using Bluetooth, which projects them on the screen of the glasses using augmented reality.
In February, Stanford Daily reported that the company has started manufacturing its first 150 preorders and would ship them within the next few months. Orders can be placed by signing up for TranscribeGlass’ Beta testing program on the website. The device is currently sold at USD 55, with the final version expected to stand at around USD 95.
Since its inception, Lavakare says that the device has gone through over five prototype iterations and has tested it on at least 300 people until now.
