I'm not going to give a direct recommendation on the hearing aids themselves as my personal options have been pretty limited due to profound hearing loss. I can say, however, that hearing aids are not the only thing that helps - especially with meetings/noisy environments.

I [recently wrote an article][0] going over my journey, but the recent technology that significantly improved my life has been live captions in glasses. Specifically, the ones from [Captify][1]. Not a paid sponsor at all, just a very happy customer.

Between the glasses for IRL settings and bluetooth/live captions on meet/etc, I've felt much more empowered in my working life.

  [0]: https://upsun.com/blog/tech-accessibility-hard-of-hearing/
  [1]: https://captify.glass/

▲ libraryofbabel 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks! I have hearing aids too and, while I don't have profound hearing loss (severe one side, moderate the other), it's got to the point where I am starting to look at other solutions to supplement them. For those not aware: hearing aids are not like eyeglasses, where you can effectively have your vision restored to 20/20 with the right prescription. They help, but they don't get you up to the level of a person with ordinary hearing. This goes particularly for situations with high background noise, multiple voices, etc.: restaurants, bars, parties and other places where social life tends to happen.

Your recommendation has made me think I should finally take the leap on live-caption glasses, which I've been watching for a while now. It sounds like they've finally got to the point where they're effective.

A question: how do you find them in conversations with multiple people? Do the glasses help you distinguish speakers by breaking out text from different voices, or is it all just a stream of words? What if there are multiple conversations going on - do the glasses manage to "focus" captioning on the one you're closest to, or do other conversations creep in?

The captions on google meet have been useful for me as well, although I do wish they were more configurable, e.g. being able to give the captioning model a list of technical phrases, internal company terms, or acronyms that are likely to come up. There also seems to be a gap still between real time transcription, which is good, and after-the-fact transcription, which is excellent. (You can also use an LLM for the latter and prompt it yourself with extra context, although that may not be the best model.)

It's been great to see so much progress in this area in the past few years. I am hoping the current (over-)investment in AI at least has the side effect of improving the tech still further.

	▲	tlar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> A question: how do you find them in conversations with multiple people? Do the glasses help you distinguish speakers by breaking out text from different voices, or is it all just a stream of words? What if there are multiple conversations going on - do the glasses manage to "focus" captioning on the one you're closest to, or do other conversations creep in? It really depends if people are talking at the same time or not. If in a close group (space matters, the mic only goes ~2-3m), one person talking at a time, then they're great. That's the setup I most often have at conferences, so it's been great there. In evenings/parties, it's a bit more chaotic, and the glasses tend to fall off for sure. Regarding distinguishing different speakers etc I haven't needed that, I use the glasses as a helper, they fill in the gaps. So it's "just a stream of words", but it has been enough to already help a ton. The directional mic does work quite well, but sometimes you have just 2 conversations happening in front of you and it's not working at all. In other setups (especially professional ones), people usually speak one at a time and it works great.

▲ embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Specifically, the ones from [Captify][1].

Looks and seems great, always felt like a no-brainer use case for the smart glasses. But considering the kind of hardware they most likely are using, how is the captioning actually happening? I'm really scared of getting hardware that is 100% cloud dependent, as eventually the company gets bought or shut down, and then you end up having to repeat the process of figuring out what to buy next, and sometimes that just one or two years in the future.

They are not making it clear how the captioning is happening, but since they don't claim it'll continue working even if the company disappears/shuts down, one can be safe to assume it's a cloud product, meaning it won't actually be a good fit for most people out there with a limited amount of money to spend on things like these.

Edit: I realize now this product is not at all for people like me, "Boost caption accuracy up to 98%" and "More accurate translations" are locked behind a $15/month subscription, kind of disgusting how they hide making the product work as it should behind a subscription.

I just want some simple glasses that can caption what people are saying without ripping me off, I guess we're too late into capitalism for that to actually be made for consumer.

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afavour an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> "Boost caption accuracy up to 98%" and "More accurate translations" are locked behind a $15/month subscription, kind of disgusting how they hide making the product work as it should behind a subscription.

I'm rarely an apologist for subscription services vs outright purchase but those features sound like ones that are going to use cloud services instead of working on-device only. If it's associated with an ongoing cost it's perfectly justifiable to charge an ongoing fee, IMO. That said I’d much prefer an option tied to how much you actually use it.

	▲	embedding-shape 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, it's the same story as always; "We need to charge a monthly fee since it requires ongoing maintenance and you paying ensures we stick around", then fast forward 2-3 years and the company gets bought and shut down. We've been through this so many times that I'm just averse to any sort of product that won't work after the company shuts down. It's so horrible to find a product, it works and functions great, almost a life-saver even, and then Google buys the startup, the founders get a pay day, and they shut down whatever servers the product used and you sit there with some useless plastic that used to be great, but now isn't even a good paperweight.

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tqwhite 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The iPhone live translation is on-device.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/123720

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embedding-shape 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

But iPhones don't sit in front of my eyes and does it automatically, which is why this whole "screens inside of glasses" thing seems so useful, if they could just figure out a way to make it work for longer than the duration of a startup.

	▲	kisper 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		How about glasses that just display text sent from a phone running live transcription software? Why not display notifications while at it?

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tlar 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They can do local transcription without internet but you do need their app, so the glasses would be useless if the company died, yes.

That said, the paid subscription has some useful features, but I personally don't care about multi-languages translation. The rest of the conversational improvements seem to help but I don't think they're necessary... although I don't know what they mean with "Boost caption accuracy". Maybe using more expensive models?