Jon’s Story: How Meta AI Glasses Make Life More Accessible for People with Hearing Loss
For the past few months, Jon Carlson has been able to live-caption his conversations while still looking right at the person he’s talking to — thanks to a pair of Meta AI glasses.
Jon, a patient of Dr. Katie Rhoads at Associated Audiologists’ Northland clinic in Kansas City, Missouri, allowed the clinic staff to try his Meta glasses for themselves during a recent visit and shared his story of how they’ve made life better for him as a person with hearing loss.
Jon gives Associated Audiologists extern Alaina Cunningham a personal glimpse at what it’s like to wear Meta glasses.
First look and he was hooked
Last Christmas, Jon was visiting family in Tennessee and a family member had a pair of the glasses. “When I saw the closed caption option, I tried it out and it was pretty neat,” Jon shared. In April, during a trip to Wisconsin, he found a local store that had the glasses for sale and jumped at the chance to get his own pair.
Meta AI glasses look like regular glasses or sunglasses, but have a number of smart features built in. They can do many of the same things your smartphone does, like take photos and videos, play music, and make calls and texts. But the difference is, the display is in the lens of the glasses themselves instead of on a separate screen.
Meta touts the hands-free, seamless convenience of having the world not just at your fingertips, but quite literally before your eyes. But for Jon, the biggest draw was a feature many Meta glasses users may not even know exists: real-time closed captioning of conversations.
Benefits of AI glasses for people with hearing loss
Jon, a hearing aid user who has had profound hearing loss in both ears since childhood, has always relied heavily on lip reading to supplement the auditory input from his hearing aids. Noisy places like restaurants and parties made conversation more challenging.
In recent years, he has used a phone app to caption in real time. But now, with the captions in his Meta glasses, Jon can stay focused on his friends and family rather than having to glance between the closed captions on his phone and his conversation partners.
“I really appreciate that it allows me to look at the person I’m talking to,” said Jon. “When I first showed the glasses to my mom, she said, ‘Oh, I wish you’d had these in high school!’ I think it would have really helped me in school because it was hard for me to hear and follow along sometimes. So this would have been a useful tool to rely on as I was sitting in class and picking up what the teacher was saying, especially when I didn’t catch everything the first time.”
Rather than a touchscreen, the glasses use a special wristband controller that picks up on certain gestures, like tapping your finger and thumb together, to navigate and select options you see on the glasses’ lens display. You can also use voice commands similar to those for a smart speaker or phone, like saying “Hey Meta” to activate a task like sending a text or snapping a photo.
In a similar vein to live captioning, the glasses can also translate several languages in real time. Jon tried this feature out with a neighbor who speaks Spanish and said it worked fairly well. He could see the English translation of her spoken Spanish on his glasses (though you still need to use a phone or have two pairs of the glasses in order to translate your own responses from English to Spanish for the other person).
Working through the tech issues
As amazing as the Meta AI glasses are, there are some downsides. For Jon, the biggest negative so far has been the battery life, which is at best 8 hours, and they often need a recharge in their case throughout the day. Jon has several of the features turned off on his pair to help preserve the battery.
The voice-to-text translation is not perfect, just like you may have experienced with other closed captioning tools or the strange ways your phone interprets your speech to text — who knew there were so many ways to misspell common words?
And just like texting or using your phone while doing other things can be dangerous, the glasses can sometimes be a distraction. They do have a built-in safety feature that disables the display while the wearer is driving, but Jon doesn’t even have them on while he’s in the car. Although you can get Meta glasses with certain prescription strengths, he opted not to and wears contact lenses to correct his vision instead.
Another widespread concern among the general public about Meta glasses is privacy. While a light flashes on the frames if a person is taking a photo or video, or livestreaming their surroundings, it is not as noticeable as someone holding up their phone or camera. Some people have encountered situations where they were being filmed, recorded or photographed without their permission and expressed concern about how the glasses might be using the data they gather.
Looking to the future of wearable accessibility technology
“I definitely can understand the concerns about privacy, but I don’t use it for photography really,” Jon said. To him, Meta glasses are primarily an accessibility tool much like his hearing aids. And he hopes they can serve that purpose for other people with hearing loss in the future.
“Technology wise, I think eventually, down the road, all of these AI glasses will have closed captioning as a standard feature,” Jon said. “Like TVs back in the 80s, there was no such thing as closed captioning — you had to order a special box for it, right? But in the 90s, captions started becoming a little more common and now, here we are! Anywhere you go, more or less, there’s closed captioning on everything. So it would not surprise me if, in the next five, 10, 15 years, closed captioning on these AI glasses would be the norm.”
With the incredible advances in hearing aid technology over the years, we’re not surprised to see how our patients are embracing additional accessibility tools like AI glasses to improve their quality of life. Who knows what new tech might be next?
