[barnabyjones]

My parents have similar issues due to hearing loss, it really makes any kind of social interaction a chore which results in a similar spiral. For years I've wanted to try to make, or hope someone else would make, a set of AR glasses that's purely focused on providing accurate real-time subtitles, no other gimmicks or features that might affect the wearability/usability. I think that's the biggest QOL boost most old folks would get from a single product, and it seems much more realistically feasible than other potential QOL solutions like robotics, but I wouldn't know where to start with building it. As a bonus, it would just need an LLM/Google Translate hookup to become an amazing travel tool.

[copperx]

Spending R&D in something like this is much more important that building fancier hearing aids. Universal subtitles would be a life changer.

[stavros]

Couldn't you do this with $500 in some Xreal Airs and a mobile phone running Parakeet right now?

[Cthulhu_]

I've seen R&D demos of universal subtitling and translating, in video conferencing, but it doesn't seem to have taken off or it's hidden behind more paywalls. I did suggest that people use good microphones when giving presentations over MS Teams for the purpose of transcriptions, archiving, searchability and AI summarization, but real time translating would be the other use case.

That said, I don't believe it would work as smoothly if used in AR, as speaking and reading are two different brain things. Plus, if it's aimed at older people, they likely have sight issues too.

To a point this is already possible, just ask people to speak into your phone with e.g. Google Translate or some other text-to-speech engine. But that's awkward, because it's a context switch to a device and the processing time required.

[peepee1982]

I've never thought of this usecase and I think it's fantastic.