Transcribe Glass is bringing subtitles to the real world

If you were on the internet at all last week there’s a good chance you saw this video:

@transcribeglass

At TranscribeGlass we’re building the world’s first all-day wearable subtitles. Here’s our CEO Tom demonstrating what it would look like t... See more

Tom Pritsky, founder & CEO of Transcribe Glass, posted that video the day after a prewriting call we did for S³. It was an old video they filmed for a conference, it breaks all of the rules of TikTok yet it gained almost 20m views in a few days.

From bootstrapped anonymity to overnight virality

Up until this point, Tom has bootstrapped Transcribe Glass from his personal savings and grants. He’s a student at Stanford who was diagnosed with a hearing disability at age 3, he’s always wanted to solve the problem of understanding others for those who are hard of hearing.

Tom has hearing aids himself but he told me only 30% of people in the UK, where they are free, have hearing aids because they don’t solve the problem of understandability. “You can pipe in high quality audio but the damaged hearing system [of someone who’s hard of hearing] won’t be able to parse it, it’s ‘blurry.’” said Tom while filming.

A real problem and solution for the founder

It’s pretty rare to see a founder that has built hardware, software, and a company around a real medical problem in their life. It’s really hard to do so. Tom and his team have however seen massive progression from what was originally only an idea to a number of beta models that they have tested with many people.

Time to scale

The tech and as of last week the customer demand is there — now it’s time to get it ready for production and scale.

Thanks for watching and thanks for reading. Keep on building the future.

Jason