I Tried the Best Captioning Smart Glasses, and Only One Leads the Pack

People with hearing loss have relied on hearing aids to communicate more effectively and comfortably. But there's now a new tech, live-captioning eyeglasses, that could be an additional accessibility tool to treat hearing loss. Instead of amplifying speech, however, these gadgets turn it into subtitles. Even if your hearing is fine, you may still find this type of device to be helpful in everyday life.

Captioning glasses are a distinct subset of smart glasses, and they work exactly as the name suggests, displaying real-time subtitles in front of your eyes—transcribing everything you hear (or can’t hear) into text, whether it's face-to-face chitchat or movie dialog at the cinema. There is a tiny display embedded in each lens, though these are single-color screens designed specifically to display captioned text, invariably in a vibrant shade of green. Don't expect typical smart-glass features like ...