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

"Akhil Nagori, Evann Sun, and Lucas Shengwen Yen, all of them15 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 over90% 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 around13 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."

"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,"

Akhil Nagori, Evann Sun, and Lucas Shengwen Yen, age 15, invented wearable AI glasses that translate text to speech in real time. The device was created as a cost-efficient tool to transcribe text from any format for visually impaired students. The prototype took about five months to build and won a $10,000 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge award. The system achieves over 90% accuracy by taking pictures, extracting text, and converting it to audio played through tiny speakers in the frames with an average load time of about 13 seconds. Development included training on 800 images, custom 3D-printed frames, and integration of a camera, battery, and speakers.

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