A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed Captioning on Glass (CoG), an Android app for Google Glass.

CoG translates speech into text using the smartphone's own software and displays it on the device's heads-up display.

Google Glass is equipped with a microphone and comes with speech-recognition technology that lets it listen to a user's commands and carry them out. The software has been refined to a point where errors are rare, although picking up sounds from a distance is still a challenge.

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CoG requires the wearable to be paired with an Android device such as a tablet or smartphone. A person speaks directly to the device with the app, and the free CoG program turns the audio into sentences, which are then sent to CoG.

The free app was developed by researchers when Jim Foley, a professor at the School of Interactive Computing, found he was having difficulty hearing. He later thought Google's wearable glasses might help him out.

"This system allows wearers like me to focus on the speaker's lips and facial gestures," Foley said. "If hard-of-hearing people understand the speech, the conversation can continue immediately without waiting for the caption."

He said that if he misses a word, he can just look at the HUD, get the words he wasn't able to understand and return the conversation.

While the paired smartphone might be inconvenient, Prof. Thad Startner, leader of the project, said it was actually helpful. He believes that holding a smartphone makes a person more careful about what he says.

He also believes a smartphone's mike is superior to the Google Glass microphone in sound quality.

TagsGoogle Glass, Georgia Institute of Technology, Captioning on Glass, caption, Google Glass Apps, Google Glassware