The best smart glasses with live captions (2026) tested with WIRED

Unlike other glasses I’ve tested, Even doesn’t sell a subscription plan; everything is included out of the box.

The only downside I could find with the G2 is that it’s largely devoid of offline features, so the glasses need to be connected to the internet to do much of anything. Given the G2’s capabilities, it’s a trade-off I’m more than happy to make.

Other lettering glasses I’ve tested

There are plenty of capable writing glasses on the market, but they’re surprisingly similar in both looks and features. While many are quite capable, none have the combination of power and affordability that I got with Even’s G2. Here’s a rundown of everything else I tested.

Leion’s Hey 2 is the price leader in this market, and even its prescription lenses ($90 to $299) are quite affordable. The hardware is heavy though: 50 grams without lenses, 60 grams with them. A full charge gives you six to eight hours of use; case adds juice for up to 12 refills.

I like Leion’s interface, which offers captions, translation, « free talk » (two-way translation), and a teleprompter feature in its clean app. You get access to nine languages; using Pro minutes extends this to 143. Leion sells its premium plan by the minute, not by the month, so you have to remember to turn this mode off when you don’t need it. The cost is $10 for 120 minutes, $50 for 1200 minutes and $200 for 6000 minutes. Offline use is not supported, and I often struggled to get the AI ​​summaries to display in English instead of Chinese (regardless of the recorded language).

You’re not seeing double: XRAI and Leion use the same manufacturer for their hardware and the glasses weigh the same. The battery specification is also similar, with up to eight hours on the frames and a further 96 hours on a recharge with the case. XRAI claims its display is significantly brighter than the competition, but I didn’t see much of a difference in day-to-day use.

The features and user experience are roughly the same, although Leion’s teleprompter feature is not implemented in XRAI’s app and does not offer AI call summaries. I also didn’t find XRAI’s app as user-friendly as Leion’s version, especially when trying to switch between the admittedly exhaustive 300 language options. Only 20 of them are included without looking for a Pro subscription, which is sold both by the month and by the minute: $20/month gets you a maximum of 600 upgraded transcription minutes and 300 translation minutes; $40/month gets you 1800 and 1200 minutes respectively. On the plus side, XRAI has a rudimentary offline mode that works better than most. For prescription lenses, add $140 to $170.

AirCaps does not manufacture its own prescription lenses. Instead, you have to buy a pair of « lens holders » for $39 and take them to an optician if you want prescription inserts. I wasn’t able to test them with prescription lenses and ended up having to try them on my regular glasses, which worked well enough for short-term testing. The frames weigh a whopping 53 grams without additional lenses; the company couldn’t tell me how much extra weight the prescription lenses would add to this, but it’s safe to say that these are the bulkiest and heaviest writing glasses on the market. Despite the weight, they only carry two to four hours of battery life, with about 10 recharges packed into the comically large case. Another option is to clip one of AirCaps’ rechargeable 13-gram Power Capsules ($79 for two) to one of the arms, which can provide 12 to 18 additional hours of juice.

The AirCaps’ list of features and interface make it perhaps the simplest of all these devices, with just one button to start and stop recording. Transcriptions and translations are available for free in nine languages. For $20/month, you can add the Pro package, which offers better accuracy, access to more than 60 languages, and the option to generate AI summaries on demand (but only if the records are long enough). As a bonus: Five hours of Pro features are free every month. Offline mode also works pretty well. The only bad news is that these bulky frames just aren’t comfortable enough for long-term wear.

The most expensive option on the market (up to $1,399 with prescription lenses!) weighs a relatively slim 40 grams (52 grams with lenses) and offers about four hours of battery life. No charging case; the glasses must be charged directly using the included USB key.

The glasses are extremely simple, offering transcription and translation functions – with support for around 80 languages, which is impressive. Unfortunately, I found the prescription lenses sent by Captify to be the blurriest of the bunch, making the labels relatively difficult to read. And although the device supports offline transcription, performance is severely degraded when disconnected from the Internet. I couldn’t get the translations to work at all when offline. For $15/month, you get better accuracy and speaker discrimination, as well as access to AI conversation summaries. Prescription lenses cost between $99 and $600.