Soyle project

My uncle lost his hearing overnight. No warning. No gradual decline. One week he was the loudest person at our family table — telling stories, laughing, always having something to say. The next week he couldn’t hear any of us. In Kazakh culture, the table is everything. Angime — sitting together and sharing stories — is how families stay connected, how wisdom passes between generations. After his diagnosis, my uncle still came to every gathering. But instead of leading the conversation, he sat quietly, watching mouths move, catching nothing, smiling at moments he couldn’t hear. I couldn’t accept that. So I started building. After several failed prototypes — glasses that overheated, projections unreadable in daylight, chips that couldn’t handle real-time processing — I finally had something that worked. Soyle. A Kazakh word meaning “speak.” Smart glasses that use real-time speech recognition to project spoken words as text directly onto the lens. The wearer reads the conversation as it happens. No lip reading. No interpreter. Just presence. I tested it with real users at a local medical center. Early sales generated $1,000. The first person I put the glasses on was my uncle — sitting at the same family table where I had watched him smile through conversations he couldn’t hear. He read our words from the lens for the first time. He didn’t say much afterward. He didn’t need to. #Soyle #AssistiveTech #Kazakhstan #HearingLoss #Agartu #KAEF