A resilient young innovator creates an affordable, accessible device for people in India and developing countries.
Image Source: https://www.transcribeglass.com/
What is TranscribeGlass?
“TranscribeGlass projects closed captions from a variety of sources onto a heads-up display, enabling the wearer to watch the speaker, receive non-verbal communication cues, and simultaneously read the captions. This greatly increases their understanding of what is being said and improves social acceptance and mobility. Caption sources include Automatic Speech Recognition, real-time human captioning, and subtitle files” (Lavakare).
Image Source: https://www.transcribeglass.com/
Founder: Madhav Lavakare
Madhav Lavakare is a young entrepreneur from New Delhi, India who has a passion for human-centered design. He believes that it’s important to empathize with other people’s issues and to reflect that in the creation process by designing with the consumer’s interests in mind.
His Story
“Five years ago, my 11th-grade high-school friend who was hard of hearing dropped out of school because day-to-day communication with other students was becoming an insurmountable problem. I tried to understand his problem better and began looking for solutions that could help him" (Lavakare).
Image Source: https://www.transcribeglass.com/
"I learned that most d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) individuals use a combination of assistive technology solutions for better communication. But they are often unaffordable, inconvenient, or inaccessible. Hearing aids & cochlear implants cost upwards of INR 5L. and require audiological examination, fitment, or surgery. Sign Language interpreters and human captioning are not readily available and are expensive. While closed captions, especially automatic speech-to-text, can be affordable and accessible, reading captions heads-down on a screen results in a loss of important non-verbal cues, reduces environmental awareness and speaker engagement, and restricts mobility” (Lavakare).
The price is set at INR 4,000 ($55) to make it affordable and accessible to the people who need them.
The beta version of TranscribeGlass should be launched in early 2023. Up to 500 people from around the world can sign-up to be an early user of the product.
Image Source: https://www.transcribeglass.com/
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