The next time you see a software engineer shaping silent words with their mouth, you may have to think twice before asking if they need a mental health day – they might just be wearing a pair of smart glasses that let them talk to their computer without uttering a sound.
Subvocal is a Y Combinator-backed startup aiming to produce these glasses, and already has working prototypes to show off in YouTube videos, including one with YC partner Dave Lieb trying them out and being impressed enough to offer funding. The headset isn’t what the final version will look like, the company notes, which is good: The demo headset is obviously 3D printed and far from fashionable.
Once the final product is available it should look a lot sleeker, based on mockups on the company’s website. It’s not clear when they’ll actually be released, though the preorder page says it’ll be sometime in Q1 2027 at an early bird price of $499. It’s not clear what the final full price will be.
As for how the glasses work, the founders, Georgia Tech computer science students Aarush Yadav and Arnav Kumar, explain in a launch post on YC that the device uses low-powered radio waves projected from the glasses toward a wearer’s face. Those waves are distorted by muscle movements and the change in a person’s face shape as they speak or simply mouth words, which the duo said can be picked up and translated into written text.
“We started working on this about four months ago after building the first version at a hackathon,” the pair explained in their YC post. “Since then, we’ve gone from a table full of electronics and antennas taped to our face to a semi-portable board and sleek glasses that can decode open-ended speech at 200+ WPM and a reasonably low error rate even at a small dataset scale.”
This is just a proof of concept, and many key details are still missing, like the accuracy rate, battery life, whether it will paired with an app, or what-have-you.
“The core thing we wanted to prove first was that the signal exists and that we can decode it,” Yadav and Kumar said.
In a Hacker News post announcing the company, Yadav and Kumar explained that they started the project during the hackathon by focusing on using EMG electrodes attached to Yadav’s face. They didn’t win the hackathon, but apparently the demo was impressive enough to earn some initial funding from San Francisco VC firm Afore Capital.
Shortly after that, the pair pivoted from EMG to RF sensing, as a commercial dictation product that required sticking electrodes to one’s face was unlikely to succeed.
“Despite prior academic research, getting this to work was a huge engineering challenge,” Yadav said. “First we built an extremely low-noise RF sensing stack. Then we had to place antennas so their fields overlapped maximally with the articulators. Our first attempt on glasses failed completely, so we reverted to old habits and taped antennas on our face.”
They eventually got to the functional prototype they have now, and pre-trained the AI models doing the speech recognition to minimize setup time. According to the company, Lieb only had to read 20 sentences to calibrate the headset to his speech patterns.
“We think silent speech can become the next interface for interacting with computers, replacing voice and the keyboard,” the company says of its goal. “Emails, prompts, messages, code, notes, commands, all at the speed of speech without bothering anyone around you.”
With just four months of work under their belts, Subvocal could be a massive hit, ushering in a new era of silent muttering productivity for workers in a variety of industries, or it could flop as it tries to scale.
Those interested in finding out can preorder a pair now for $199, with the other $300 not due until the glasses ship. ®