Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations [video]

> We don't censor anything.

I hadn't thought that you would be, but I don't know anyone who hasn't had at least one service they used change their terms for the worse over time, especially once it becomes successful or ownership/management changes. Better to safeguard against such problems before they are problems than come to depend on a device like this only to find yourself stuck when the rug gets pulled out from under you.

> We are soon to release purely on-device transcription

This is really great! It's so important that people don't have to worry that things said between them and a lover, or a doctor, or a client, or a therapist is going to end up exposed to anyone else.

If you really want this device to be able to help people without opening them up to exploitation, please try to develop it to be as open as possible. Making it easy for developers to use it with whatever other hardware they like (a PC vs a cell phone), or even allowing them to extend it by adding new or customized functionality would be ideal and could help people in ways you hadn't even considered.

This is a cool product and a great use of the technology, and I'd love to be able to recommend it without reservation.

Because learning written English isn't easy when the sounds it represents are not part of your sensory experience. It's more like learning Egyptian hieroglyphics. Plus many parents either can't or won't invest the effort/money to make it happen. Lots of parents never even learn ASL to communicate with their own kids. Met a mother in a beginner ASL class finally deciding to learn enough to communicate with her 20 year old daughter (Who was born deaf and illiterate FTR). It broke my heart when I met the daughter and found out she basically had no exposure to other signers too. Deaf all her life and she didn't have a name-sign.

There's "cognitive impairment" and then there's "nobody bothered to communicate enough for a kid to build communication skills."

> I don't see how this is inherently worse than mobile phones,

the problem isn't that it's worse than a cell phone. The problem is that it isn't any better. All of the privacy and security problems that exist with cell phones now exist with this product. You're locked in to using a cell phone which, for most people, is a hardware platform that Google controls and exploits at your expense.

You can't secure your cell phone and keep it private, and so nothing on your cell phone should be assumed to be secure or private.

If I'm in my doctors office, or working with a client, or doing anything where I don't want Google and who knows who else listening I can turn off my phone, or put it away, or leave it at home, and be reasonably sure that I'm not being eavesdropped on (there's always some risk of three letter agencies listening, but you can't do anything about that), but that's not an option if I need my phone to transcribe every word being said to me and even in situations where I currently leave my phone on it isn't normally sending every word it hears to the cloud to transcribe and send back to me either.

I like that this can work with a cell phone app, but it'd be much better if it could be used entirely offline, and ideally on different hardware as well, including a PC.

Imagine being able to run something like this entirely offline connected to something the size of an ipod or even a nano running linux. Imagine being able to build your own tools to interface with it. Add your own substitutions/annotations to real time text. Add dictionaries, or translation features.

This could be really cool even life-changing tech for people, or it could just be one more technology that's convenient but ultimately used to exploit people.

This is stupid and meaningless pedantry. Like when you ask your teacher if you can go to the bathroom and they say “I don’t know, can you?”

A system of writing can be used for any language. (Have you ever wondered why English, a Germanic language, or Vietnamese, an Austroasiatic language, use a writing system based on the Latin alphabet?) Any language that doesn’t use a system of writing can use a system of writing. It’s not like it’s some sort of existential impossibility.