How LLVision is helping hard-of-hearing people with smart glasses using Speech-to-Text

At LLVision, we’re excited to help usher in a promising era for augmented reality (AR). We see growing potential now that people are welcoming AR as a tool, not just a toy.

Building on our nine years as a developer of enterprise-grade AR smart glasses for industry and the public sector, we are able to also apply our innovation as a force for good, benefiting people around the world who are living with hearing loss and Deafness. While they look a lot like standard reading glasses, our consumer-focused LEION Hey glasses integrate automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to display captions in real time, helping the wearer to communicate more easily.

We created these glasses to help people of all backgrounds and abilities better communicate by addressing gaps in communication among various communities.

Delivering AR power to a range of industries

Our company got its start in Beijing in 2014 with a vision of embedding the interactions between humans, machines, and data with artificial intelligence (AI) and AR technologies. Since then, we’ve worked with more than 5,000 companies worldwide, with use cases ranging from healthcare to security, education, insurance, manufacturing, and more.

Three highly successful use cases include:

• China Southern Airlines: One of the world’s largest air carriers uses our industrial AR glasses to streamline communications and record-keeping for its maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) organization.A recent Harvard Business Review article documented how China Southern Airlines’ mechanics on the tarmac use the glasses to aid with automated object recognition for aircraft parts. Engineers also share their first-person perspective of any issue areas via live video, and collaborate in real time with engineers and other personnel using voice, along with capabilities for viewing documentation, pictures, graphs, and videos through our AR glasses.
• Bureau Veritas: A global leader in industrial testing, inspection, and certification (TIC) services, Bureau Veritas similarly uses our AR glasses with field staff to improve quality control and accelerate issue resolution while reducing costs.
• SANY Group: A leader in construction and engineering machinery, SANY Group positioned AR glasses as a key part of a powerful equipment maintenance solution that enhances knowledge sharing, improves training, and delivers better customer experiences.

In partnership with SAP, our AR glasses integrate with the SAP AR Field Service Management Solution, enabling a wide array of companies to improve service delivery efficiency and optimize operating resources.

Visualizing everyday conversations

Our success serving business needs in manufacturing, transportation, and other industries inspired us to further develop our technology to provide even more benefits to more people worldwide. By September 2022, we were ready to debut our LEION Hey glasses for consumers. They use Speech-to-Text from Google Cloud to instantly transcribe live speech into captions visible to the wearer of the glasses.

Google Cloud ASR technology enables our LEION Hey glasses to support multiple languages, including English, Chinese, Korean, French, Russian, and Spanish, with more to come. The API integration simplifies our ability to serve customers in many countries. As a result, we don’t need to redesign our product for each local market.

We had a very good experience with the Google for Startups Accelerator: Southeast Asia. We received a lot of valuable feedback about our approach to product R&D and marketing strategies from Google Cloud experts. Our participation helped reinforce our team’s entrepreneurial spirit, while the Google Cloud team supported us as we started a “new” business again, but this time for the global consumer market.

In another important milestone last year, our LEION Hey glasses received a “Top 10 Global Science and Technology Innovation Award" at the UNESCO Netexplo Innovation Forum.

The award complements the wonderful feedback we are getting from customers who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing, including those who face challenges with noisy environments or in reading lips when others are wearing masks. By enabling better comprehension, communication, and social connections, the glasses can be life-changing for many people.

This is supported by research we’ve conducted in cooperation with Tsingua University, where we found that information acquisition ability, including accuracy, increased by 40% to 50% for people using our AR glasses compared to using traditional hearing aids. Further, in comparing research participants using our glasses versus mobile phone app transcriptions, discussion participation increased by 23% with use of the glasses.

For people who are not hard-of-hearing — but just want assistance communicating in other languages — the glasses are also very useful. We are exploring additional AI-powered features that consumers might like, such as helping people remember things and connecting to internet services for ordering food or transportation.

It’s an exciting time for emerging, new innovations enabled by AI that we hope will improve the lives of many people.

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