Live data from Hacker News

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

youtube.com

161–170 of 181 posts

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

#161

Background: researched this space for a graduate degree. There are a few issues that are unanswered by this video (which isn't intended to be a technical deep dive, but I don't see any related links in the video description): 1. How do these glasses handle multiple simultaneous speakers? Based on the display I saw, it shows the speakers' words sequentially, which starts to fall apart in real-world environments, espec…

Is multiple simultaneous speakers at the same volume/distance actually an important problem to solve? I already can't have a conversation if that's happening and my hearing is fine.

This is an extremely common situation at many restaurants and is a reason I don't really enjoy going out to eat with friends without prior investigation.

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

#162
post #73
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. There seems to be such a gap in the market for privacy-first hardware but very few companies are doing anything.

The key question is always a painfully simple one: how much are people willing to pay as a privacy-first premium? The answers to this determine everything. Treating privacy-first as the moral and ethical default we should expect everyone to start from is a wonderful idea, rooted in compassion, kindness, and a foundational respect for human rights. It has also been an abject failure to date. We should not expect the f…

This is why the solution involved legislation and regulation. If it prices the low end out of the market, so be it.

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

#163
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't it more than 70%? I'm assuming this is in an english language majority language, so everyone that can should want to be able to read english.

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…

That is massively sad. You'd think that the school system would put her in contact with others, but schools can fix everything that parents lack.

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

#164
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if it put the captions over the speaker (in a speech bubble?)

There’s a significant amount of evidence pointing to the fact that “anchored” captions (a la speech bubbles, like a comic book) is a preferred way to render captions, assuming the bubbles are at the same focal distance as the speaker. This is solvable with “true” AR, but getting that compute into the lightweight form factor of the original video is an unsolved problem, and is a ways off.

We have true AR with 3D placement now on these glasses

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

#165

Background: researched this space for a graduate degree. There are a few issues that are unanswered by this video (which isn't intended to be a technical deep dive, but I don't see any related links in the video description): 1. How do these glasses handle multiple simultaneous speakers? Based on the display I saw, it shows the speakers' words sequentially, which starts to fall apart in real-world environments, espec…

Is low latency wireless transmission feasible now? The last time I worked on anything here, there were a number of problems with transmitting highly compressed, low resolution video data. The consumer devices could not handle just sending the packets. In my project we were annotating real time video and only sending back the annotations, but even that would cause devices to overheat and the applications to fail in re…

Yes we demonstrated XRAI running on the Qualcomm Reference Wireless Viewer at MWC

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

#166

Background: researched this space for a graduate degree. There are a few issues that are unanswered by this video (which isn't intended to be a technical deep dive, but I don't see any related links in the video description): 1. How do these glasses handle multiple simultaneous speakers? Based on the display I saw, it shows the speakers' words sequentially, which starts to fall apart in real-world environments, espec…

The Android voice recording app can already write a transcript in real time that indicates different speakers.

But not in AR

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

#167
The number one thing these glasses/software need to solve is that the words match the speech for a one to one conversation in a quiet environment. Eg doctors visit. I think they are very close.

We just got the Nreal/Xrai setup a few days ago for deaf from birth wife (hearing husband) She grew up lipreading but integrated more with signing and deaf community as an adult. She has a cochlear implant but can not understand language from sound alone. And really doesn't enjoy hearing that much unless we are watching a movie etc where the sound is 100% linked to the visual.

Initial reaction to the setup is. 1. Impressed, hopeful, excited 2. A bit complicated technically. More stuff to deal with. not an everyday thing. 3. Phone battery usage high. Maybe 3 - 4 hours 4. In the right situation they will be really powerful. 5. Need more control over the interface eg show/hide 'listening' icon etc. Can be distracting. Move subtitle position (maybe you can) 6. Processing delay can make you more an observer of the conversation. Response time is delayed enough to interrupt the flow a conversation. (satellite tv connection interviews)

The number one barrier to using them is having everything ready for the moment they are needed. You need to plan ahead. Takes a few mins to set up.

All the other high end ideas can be set aside while the core function is dialed in.

We really appreciate the effort and hope to contribute.

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. It's easy to read hostility where there isn't any. > ASL isn’t a “foreign” language. It’s an American language. Elsewhere in this thread you mentioned that "ASL is a complete and distinct natural language in its own right," and that's the sense I was trying to convey by calling it a "foreign" language. It's as hard to acquire as a foreign language, and carries the same benefits. And it fit the analogy. I…

Do you realize that “learn to lip read” isn’t feasible for a lot of people? That’s great that lip reading worked for the one Deaf person you know. But Deaf people, like the population at large, are all different people. It’s cruel and ridiculous to suggest all Deaf people should just learn to lip read. I tried to explain the cruel history behind your callous remark. I tried to give you an opportunity to empathize wit…

>It’s cruel and ridiculous to suggest all Deaf people should just learn to lip read.

Yet you seem to think everyone is obligated to learn sign language...

>Spanish is easy enough to learn for your trip but ASL is too difficult to learn?

Spanish is NOT "easy enough to learn"; perhaps some basic phrases for tourists, but certainly not fluency. It takes years to master a new language for most people, if ever. Spanish is relatively easier for English speakers than many other languages, such as Japanese, but it's not something you're going to become conversational in quickly unless you're gifted at language learning.

The idea that people are somehow "cruel" and "narrow-minded" for not learning a particular language that isn't the dominant language in their region is the most ridiculous thing I've read all day, and that includes the comments from North Korea supporters here.

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

#169
This has the potential to be the killer app for mixed reality once instant / realtime translation is possible. Imagine being able to understand every language in the world - and if two users of this product meet, being able to converse without learning each other's language.

It would be a technological Babelfish.

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

#170
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it’d substantially increase the compute load, but I’d be curious if you could use multiple microphones and beam forming to separate out the streams of speech and feed them to the TTS algorithm independently.

Single-mic source separation is possible in an unsupervised manner today that could probably work better than beamforming both compute-wise and with regard to implementation difficulty (you'd just need a lot of recordings to represent the space of sounds you want to separate).

Do you have any references for this or a link to a commercial service? I'm currently in the process or trying to extract some background voices in a video (an interview where the faint background conversation is in English and the loud overdub is in Bulgarian). I tried Melodyne but it seems to only separate on pitch, not volume, and the pitchs are too similar (mono, three voices, all female) and words are made of lots of short phonemes which each create a "note" and makes editing impossible. I looked into Izotope RX as well and it does not seem capable of doing this either. There are services that can automatically add subtitles using speech-to-text translators but they are expensive, and I'd prefer to have the background voices rather than the Bulgarian interpretation of them translated back into English. It seems possible to do, in Peter Jackson's The Beatles:Get Back they were able to separate voices from loud foreground musical sounds and other ambient talking, but that technology was custom and doesn't seem to be publicly available yet.
Post reply on HN