Student creates smart glasses for people with hearing loss | Cornell Chronicle
For a person with hearing loss, a room full of people talking all at once can be a nightmare scenario. Even with hearing aids, it’s often difficult to hear the one person speaking right in front of you.
Nirbhay Narang ’25 has created smart glasses to help people manage this situation. The glasses use AI to provide transcriptions of conversations in real time, which can be viewed both on the glasses and on a phone.
“I’m passionate about human-computer interaction,” said Narang, a computer science major in the College of Arts & Sciences. “I consider myself a designer rather than an engineer and have friends who have been working in the smart glasses space for some time.”
Narang’s company, AirCaps, is taking pre-orders for the lightweight glasses. The technology works by capturing a conversation, movie audio or speaker’s voice through a phone’s microphone, transcribing it immediately on the phone and sending the transcription to the glasses. His company created the software and app that make the connection seamless.
In the U.S. alone, their first market, there are about 30 million people with disabling hearing loss, Narang said, not to mention hundreds of millions of others around the world.
