AI glasses that turn sound into subtitles.
Built by Paras Tickoo
Hear Bright is a prototype designed to convert speech into visible text and important ambient sounds into visual alerts.
Imagine someone speaking and their words appearing directly in front of your eyes. Or an alarm sounding behind you and a visual warning appearing before you need to turn around.
That is the idea behind Hear Bright, an assistive smart-glasses prototype being built by Paras Tickoo, a 15-year-old Class 10 student from Delhi. He describes the ambition in three words: subtitles for life.
A microphone captures speech, which the system converts into text for a display positioned in the wearer's field of view. The prototype is also designed to recognise important ambient sounds, such as alarms and sirens, and translate them into visual alerts.
Inside the 3D-printed frame are a camera, microphones, speakers, display modules and a microcontroller. Paras has also been training the system to recognise selected Indian Sign Language and customised hand gestures that could be converted into spoken words.
Gesture recognition remains difficult because lighting, angle, position and movement speed can change what a camera sees. Paras has responded by collecting more data, retraining models and seeking feedback from NGOs and potential users.
Hear Bright is still a prototype and needs extensive testing before everyday use. But its direction is powerful: not asking people to adapt to a world organised around sound, but asking whether technology can make that world more accessible to them.