Comment by tlar

> the recent technology that significantly improved my life has been live captions

I was at a meeting earlier this month where the Zoom live captions were displayed on-screen. This is not something I ever use or had much need for but they were quite good. It handled different English speakers, with some distinctly different accents, very well. It got a couple of words wrong here and there, usually proper names or acronyms but it was generally quite impressive, and much better than the "text to speech" efforts last time I really tried them years ago.

A low cost option is to use the live transcribe that is embedded in apple phones. I have a family member who uses this in conjunction with hearing aids. It isn't discrete but it helps her out - especially in larger conversations with many people.

FWIW it is far from perfect but it is helpful - and better than any paid apps that we've encountered.

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.

I see they have a subscription and it requires an app. Does the app require an account and all that jazz or can I just use it without giving away anything?

Does Captify perform any diarization?

> 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.