At 15, this Delhi student is building AI smart glasses that give deaf users subtitles for life. Says, 'This American businessman became his biggest inspiration'

Imagine sitting in a busy room where conversations are happening around you, an alarm suddenly rings, or someone calls your name, but you cannot hear any of it. A 15-year-old student from Delhi is trying to make those sounds visible. Paras Tickoo, a Class 10 student, has developed Hear Bright, an AI-powered smart-glasses prototype designed to help deaf and hard-of-hearing people communicate and better understand sounds around them. He describes his idea simply as providing “subtitles for life.”

A 15-year-old develops AI-smart glasses to help deaf communicate

Paras's interest in coding began in Class 4 and gradually expanded from basic visual programming to Python, artificial intelligence and computer vision. But Hear Bright wasn't born simply from an interest in technology. According to India Today, the idea became more personal after Paras learnt about the experiences of Saransh, a child from his hometown, and the communication difficulties he faced. Samsung has separately reported Paras recalling a neighbour with disabilities who depended heavily on his parents, an experience he said stayed with him. “As a child, I had a neighbour who was deaf and blind and depended on their parents for everything,” Paras said.

How do the AI glasses work?

Hear Bright attempts to bridge communication in several ways. A microphone captures speech and converts it into text displayed in front of the wearer. Paras is also training the system to recognise selected Indian Sign Language and customised hand gestures, which could then be converted into spoken words.


The prototype is additionally designed to recognise important sounds such as alarms and sirens and turn them into visual warnings. Inside the 3D-printed frame are components including a camera, microphones, speakers, display modules and a microcontroller. On the software side, Paras has worked with technologies including MediaPipe, TensorFlow.js and machine-learning models.

Getting hand gestures right remains difficult

The teenager hasn't solved every problem yet. One major challenge is accurately recognising gestures. The same hand movement can appear different to a camera depending on lighting, angle, position and how quickly someone moves. Paras has responded by collecting more gesture data and repeatedly retraining his models. He is also working with NGOs and seeking feedback from potential users instead of assuming what they need.

Paras isn't working in isolation. Accessibility has become a recurring theme among India's young technology innovators. In 2025, 16-year-old Pranet Khetan developed Paraspeak, an AI system that converts impaired or slurred Hindi speech into clearer audio. Samsung says Khetan built a dataset using more than 1,400 voice samples from 28 patients because suitable Hindi dysarthric-speech data was scarce.

From coding lessons to solving a human problem

Hear Bright still needs substantial testing and refinement before it could become an everyday assistive product. But Paras's journey demonstrates something larger than the technology itself. As he told India Today, “technology becomes truly meaningful when it solves a real problem and improves someone else’s life. For a teenager who started with coding lessons in school, that philosophy has led to an ambitious goal: making a world built around sound a little more visible.