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 featurethat could instantly caption conversations in English, Spanish, French, Russian, Korean or Japanese.
And the reason why the connected phone’s microphone is used, rather than the built-in mic on Google Glass, is because Glass’ microphone is designed to capture speech from the wearer.
The team is also working on an app designed to translate spoken languages in real time, which would be a great utility for travelers to foreign destinations.