Silicon Valley tech companies are raising billions of dollars to develop wearable AI-powered products. A trio of teens from near Santa Clara built theirs for less than $100.
Akil Nagori, Evan Sun, Lucas Shenwen Yen, all At age 15, he invented wearable glasses powered by AI that translated text into speech in real time.
“Our main goal was to create an easy and cost-effective way to transcribe text in any format for visually impaired students,” Nagori told Business Insider.
Nagori, Sun, and Yen submitted their prototype, which took about five months to complete, to the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge in October, where they won a $10,000 prize.
The glass took Akhil Nagori, Evan Sun and Lucas Shengwenyen about five months to create. Akhil Nagori
The boys said the prototype was over. The accuracy when translating text to speech is 90%. The glasses are designed to take a photo, extract the text, and convert the text to audio, which is played through a small speaker built into the frame of the glasses.
“One of the most important aspects of our project is load time,” Yen says. “And that averages out to about It's 13 seconds. ”
The idea to develop AI-powered text-to-speech glasses came after Nagori traveled to India to visit his family, including his visually impaired great-uncle, who works as a cashier.
“He has all these boxes full of Braille receipts, and he has to go through them line by line,” Meigori said. “When I saw that, I said, 'There's got to be an easier way to do it that's not as tedious.'”
Sun, Nagori, and Yen used 800 images to train their software
To create the glasses, the boys had to clear three hurdles: hardware, software, and data collection through testing. Sun said he designed the glasses frames in CAD software Fusion 360 and used a 3D printer.
“We found the average glasses measurements for middle school to high school students,” Sun said. “Since we are trying to mount all the components on glass, we had to custom design areas for all the components.”
The glasses contain a camera, battery, speaker, and a small computer board called a Raspberry Pi. It also has a small on/off switch.
“We want students to use this throughout the school day, giving and receiving,” Sun said. “We're very concerned about battery life, especially when you're using such a small battery.”
As for the software, Nagori said they custom trained a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) on a dataset of 800 images collected from school textbooks and other educational materials. They made sure that the model was trained on the colorful images and different types of fonts that often characterize textbooks.
Akhil Nagori wears a prototype of AI-powered glasses. Akhil Nagori
“We had to take these images ourselves in three different lighting conditions that mimicked classroom, low-light, and outdoor lighting,” says Nagori.
To collect data for the prototype, we had to conduct many test rounds.
“After all the hardware and software were completed, we tested the software part,” Sun said. “We were inputting images that we saw online or that we captured ourselves into a software model. The text was then extracted and an MP3 file was generated that we could use to improve accuracy.”
Although Nagori, Sun, and Yen's prototype eventually gained national recognition, their journey was not without its challenges.
“There were many all-nighters,'' Nagori said.
At one point, Yen said the glasses had a serious flaw, hours before he was scheduled to present the prototype at a science competition.
“On the flight there, some of the solder came off the Raspberry Pi. Without the solder, nothing worked and the glasses wouldn't start. We were all in a panic,” Yen said. “The night before the presentation, my dad ran to the nearest repair shop and got a soldering iron. The three of us put on our masks, bent down, and fixed it.”
scale up
The Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge is a top STEM research competition for students, so receiving recognition is a notable accomplishment.
To qualify, middle school students must participate in a local science or engineering fair, where judges recommend the top 10 percent of projects. Approximately 2,000 of them apply for the national competition, but only 300 are selected. From there, judges will narrow the field down to 30 applicants, who will present their research and complete the challenge in Washington, DC.
Akhil Nagori and Evan Sun received the Thermo Fisher Scientific Leadership Award. scientific association
In addition to the $10,000 prize the boys won for their glasses, Nagori also won the Thermo Fisher Scientific Leadership Award. Sun received a $10,000 Lemelson Foundation Invention Award.
Winning the tournament meant a lot to Nagori, Sun, and Yen, who were not initially nominated. However, state-level judges attended the men's competition and recognized the value of the study.
“I think it really taught me that even if you don't get what you want at first, if you keep working hard and being dedicated, you can come back and be even better,” Sun said.
Their research is still in the prototype stage, but they have ambitious plans to expand. Nagori said she received a $5,000 grant to help the glasses scale up, allowing them to reach more communities.
“We are currently working on introducing many glasses across California,” Nagori said. “Right now, I have a big 3D printer in my garage, 30 Raspberry Pis, 30 cameras, and 30 batteries.”
