Down the Tubes Productions

The Hearing Loss Association of America Boston Chapter’s Walk4Hearing was held back in Spooky Month. You probably don’t need to be reminded of that fact. What with all our shameless begging for money and all. I’m pleased to report that we are grateful for your generosity on a couple of fronts. 
On Sunday October 5th, y’all helped us earn first place. We were first among 25 teams and collectively we earned $44,201 for HLAA. But wait there’s more! Tom, and good folks at Captify, awarded us with a free pair of their closed caption classes for our top-earning efforts. So, this week, I want to talk a bit about the technology.

Julie’s Take

Brad and I were the fortunate recipients of a pair of Captify Glasses as a result of our being the top fundraiser at the HLAA Boston Chapter Walk4Hearing event in October, 2025. Tom and the Captify team were incredibly generous in donating this item, and even more generous with the time that they took to walk us through the operation of the glasses, the technology behind it, and the vision for its continued evolution as a tool for the hard of hearing. 

I took first possession of the glasses, armed with the information, know-how, and written instructions – and still managed to reset the operating language to a non-English character based system. All within the first few days of ownership. I managed to return the language option mostly back to English, but at times characters appeared. I cannot underscore that this glitch had everything to do with my impulsivity and excitement to use the technology – and not the design of the product.  

I bounded down the driveway towards my unsuspecting neighbor when I got home from the Walk4Hearing that night. He was sitting unassumingly outside, enjoying a beverage, and was confronted by me giggling with unadulterated glee and fumbling fingers, thrusting a pair of black framed glasses in his direction. I provided zero direction beyond, “PUT THEM ON!”  He humored me, likely hoping that by following my vague directive I would leave him in peace. He dubiously placed them on his face, and while I babbled about everything and nothing all at once, I watched as his eyes suddenly grew very wide and he uttered, “My God. This is…wow…”. He works in the technology field and once he got past the utter shock of it all, he started asking me tech specific questions that I could not understand, never mind answer – but regardless he was astounded by the technology and what it could mean for people with hearing loss. 

As one of those people with hearing loss, I was excited to bring the glasses to school with me the next day. I wear two hearing aids, and as a teacher of elementary students with exceptional needs, I have been very transparent with my students about how my body works differently than theirs because my ears do not work the same. I encourage my students to “ask the curious questions” about my hearing loss, and frequently share the assistive technology that I use to help my “ears work like theirs do”. I knew that the Captify glasses were going to make a splash during their appearance in my classroom. My students did not disappoint, with reactions running the gamut from the loud, ‘WHAT IS THIS!?” to a confused statement, “Wait…I see words? Am I supposed to see words?” and my personal favorite response, “This. Is. Going. To. Help. You. SO SO SO MUCH!” I found that in my personal usage the Captify glasses worked best when I faced a single speaker. My students wanted me to wear them during a lesson, but unfortunately the reality of an elementary school classroom is that there is a lot of noise, overlapping conversation, and background noise at all times which made effective use of the glasses a challenge.  

The Captify glasses are programmed to be able to translate across multiple languages. I had the opportunity to work with a student that was a newcomer to our school. She is a native Spanish speaker and reader, and while she has made incredible strides with her command of English, it has been a struggle for her to access academic content with the same ease as is in her native language. I had an “aha” moment one day, and programmed the Captify glasses to translate from English to Spanish. Her hands flew to the sides of her face as a gasp escaped from her lips, astounded by the translation happening – quite literally – before her eyes. This made me realize that the power of this technology extends well beyond just being a tool for the hard of hearing. 

I have had entirely too much fun taking the Captify glasses on their own personal “world tour”, placing them on the faces of any and everyone that has crossed my path. I intend to try them in a few more work meetings and perhaps several small group lesson opportunities to further gauge their effectiveness relative to my hearing loss. 

I am encouraged by this technology, and it has instilled confidence in me that while my hearing continues to decline there are genius minds at work creating innovative technologies that will keep me connected to an auditory world. 

Brad’s Take

When I evaluate a new technology, I find it’s easier to break said review into a bulleted list. So that’s what I’m going to do here.

Lightning Round Review

• I love the idea of not having to choose where to look when using live captions; at the person speaking or at my phone. Of course I could always hold up my phone next to the person’s face, but that would almost certainly distract the speaker too much. That’s why I love the Captify solution. By having the captions displayed on glasses’ lenses, I can look at both the speaker and the captions. 
• The glasses are a little bulky. But not as bad as some of the glasses I’ve seen. And there are more than a few. It’s fantastic to see such a growth of competition in the caption glasses field. 
• The heavy-lifting is done via a phone app. A lot of the settings, and the microphone to capture the voices, are in there.
• Navigating the menu via the glasses’ touch panel is tricky. I changed the language back to English but am not sure how I did so!
• The power button is the back button. 
• You can start a session by either tapping the green icon in the app or tapping the panel on the ear piece with the Transcribe option selected. 
• It captures a good bit of ambient sound:
  • Typing
  • Sneezing
  • Breathing
  • Burping (excuse me!)
• In my office, where the Wi-Fi is bad, it kept losing connection to the Wi-Fi. Without the Wi-Fi it didn’t work. There may be a way to have an offline session but I didn’t get a chance to figure out if that’s the case.
• I was watching a training video that didn’t have captions. I used the glasses and it worked very well. 
• The captions get washed out if I look at something with a backlight or just a bright area. 
• A co-worker didn’t want to use them because she said they’d make her nauseous
  • I noticed a little queasiness myself at first
• Another co-worker couldn’t use them because she needed prescription lenses. Which IS something Captify offers
• I had someone who was blind in one eye try them. The ability to move the captions to one-lens-only allowed her to use them. 
• After not using them for a day, I couldn’t reconnect. I’d have to forget the device in the app and then re-find and re-pair it. This is probably a user error.

That’s my incomplete list of first impressions. I’m excited that we don’t have to give them back. That means I can continue to use them. And show them to other people. Most people were impressed by what they saw. And the more buy-in you get from people the more buying they’ll do. And that’ll lead to an already impressive product getting even better.

OK I Lied

After I wrote the above, inspiration struck. So I have a li’l more to say.

Two of my favorite current blues artists are Jon Bonamassa and Beth Hart. I’d discovered them independently and then found that they recorded three albums together. They went on tour, too. So, I got one of the concert DVDs. The trouble was, there were no captions. 

I wrote about how this made me feel last October. I won’t rehash those gloomy notes here. 

One night, as I sat on the couch with a book in my hand and a dog on my lap, I happened to glance at my DVDs. I saw the gloomy DVD and realized, I may have something to turn my frown upside down.

Captify. 

I thought if I placed my phone next to my TV, kicked off a session, and put on the glasses, I could get myself some lyrics to read. 

I held my breath as Jon and the band started the show off with a blistering instrumental flourish. There were no captions yet, but then again there were no words yet. As I continued to hold my breath, I recalled Beth’s powerful pipes and hoped against hope that it would work. 

It didn’t. 

The instruments were just too much for my iPhone’s mic to overcome. I don’t think this is a problem with the design of the Captify, I think that just shows how blasted hard hearing actually is. For all of those people afraid of the robot apocalypse, this is exhibit 112, why there’s nothing to fear. Being able to pick out a voice amongst guitars and drums and horns is an incredibly hard feat. One that most people’s auditory system does with ease. 

But I’m not most people. 

Mine is not your average auditory system. And so, like the Captify glasses, the instruments made a muddle of the voice for my ears; bionic or biologic. 

That said, I’m actually encouraged by everything I’ve seen with Captify. This is still a new technology. We’ve become unrealistic with our expectations with technology. Most technologies are just that, plural. There are a lot of smaller pieces of tech that make up what we think of as a single piece of tech. These glasses use; AI, voice recognition, Bluetooth, battery, and probably other technologies I’m not privy to. In fact, another package of technologies I’ve been hearing about may have been able to help. Amazon FireTVs have something called “dialog boost”. Since speech happens at a certain range on the audiogram, I can see how this can be done. 

But even without a FireTV all was not lost! 

There was a second behind-the-scenes disc. And the Captify glasses worked marvelously for that. They still had trouble picking out the voices when the music went from the background to the foreground. But ultimately, I was encouraged by what it could do. I just hope this doesn’t make DVD makers lazy and so they lean on HAT technologies like this to save money and skip captioning. 

The green brings me back
To my Oregon Trail days.
But this isn’t a game.