Georgia Tech researchers have come up with an app that turns Google Glass into a real-time closed-captioning display for the hearing-impaired, using the voice recognition in the user’s Glass-paired smartphone. Now this is a face-computer use we can get behind.
Captioning on Glass uses a Glass wearer’s smartphone as a remote microphone. The Glass wearer simply hands his or her phone to the other person in the conversation, and the smartphone’s mic picks up what the other person is saying. Nearly instantly, a transcription shows up on the Glass display.
Naturally, for the deaf or hearing-impaired, this is a fantastic application. And the research team is working on an even more broadly-applicable integration, a two-way translation feature that could instantly caption conversations in English, Spanish, French, Russian, Korean or Japanese.
The one drawback of this setup: It requires the Glass wearer to hand over his or her smartphone to the other person in the conversation, perhaps not the best idea when talking to strangers. But the benefit this could present for day-to-day communication among trusted peers is phenomenal. [Captioning on Glass via
CNet]