Silicon Valley is raising billions to develop AI products. These 15-year-olds built theirs for under $100.

Three California teenagers created text-to-speech smart glasses powered by AI. The wearable tech helps visually impaired students access reading materials. Akhil Nagori, Evann Sun, and Lucas Yen's prototype won a $10,000 prize at a top science competition. Tech companies in Silicon Valley are raising billions to develop wearable AI-powered products. A trio of teenagers in nearby Santa Clara built theirs for less than $100. Akhil Nagori, Evann Sun, and Lucas Shengwen Yen, all of them 15 years old, invented wearable glasses powered by AI that translate text to speech in real time. "Our main goal was to create an easy, cost-efficient way to transcribe text from 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 and won a $10,000 award. The boys said their prototype has over 90% accuracy when translating text to speech. The glasses are designed to take pictures, extract the text, and convert the text to audio played through tiny speakers built into the glasses frames. "One of the most important aspects of our project is the load time," Yen said. "And that averaged around 13 seconds." The idea to build AI-powered text-to-speech glasses came after Nagori traveled to India to visit family, including his great-uncle who is visually impaired and works as a cashier. "He has all these boxes filled with these braille receipts. He has to go through them line by line," Nagori said. "When I saw that, I said, 'There's got to be an easier way that's not so 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 collecting data through testing. Sun said they designed the glasses frames with Fusion 360, a CAD software, and used a 3D printer. "We found the average glasses dimensions for middle to high school students," Sun said. "Since we're trying to have all of the components on the glasses, we had to custom-design the areas for all of them." The glasses contain a camera, battery, speakers, and a small computer board called a Raspberry Pi . They also have a tiny on-and-off switch. "We want students to use this for, give or take, the entire school day," Sun said. "We are really concerned about the battery life, especially when we are using such a small battery." For software, Nagori said they custom-trained a convolutional recurrent neural network, or CRNN, on a dataset of 800 images collected from school textbooks and other education materials. They ensured that the model was trained on colorful images and different types of fonts, which are often characteristic of textbooks. "We had to take those images ourselves in three different lighting conditions that mimicked classroom, low lighting, and outdoor lighting," Nagori said. Collecting data on their prototype involved conducting many test rounds. "After all our hardware and software were done, we...

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