Silicon Valley is raising billions to develop wearable AI products. These 15-year-olds built theirs for under $100. (www.businessinsider.com)

Three California teenagers, Akhil Nagori, Evann Sun, and Lucas Yen, have developed innovative AI-powered text-to-speech smart glasses designed to assist visually impaired students. The prototype, which costs under $100 to produce and boasts over 90% accuracy in translating text to audio, won a $10,000 prize at the prestigious Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. This project emerged from Nagori's personal experience with his visually impaired great-uncle, highlighting a need for more accessible reading solutions. The smart glasses feature a camera, a Raspberry Pi computer board, and custom-designed frames created with 3D printing technology. The trio trained a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) on a dataset of 800 images to ensure the software is effective under various lighting conditions. Their journey faced multiple technical challenges, including hardware defects before competition, which they resolved through teamwork and persistence. With a grant to help scale their production, the students are now focusing on expanding their impact across California, demonstrating that innovation can emerge from unexpected sources, even at a young age.