Legato, a hearing technology startup, began selling its flagship AI-powered hearing glasses on Thursday, putting a wearable computer and a hearing aid into a single pair of frames. The company announced the product is available for purchase directly from Legato.
The glasses use an open-ear design, meaning they leave the ear canal unobstructed rather than plugging it with a traditional earpiece or molded tip. A dual-speaker system inside the frames directs amplified sound toward the wearer, so conversations and audio reach the person wearing the glasses without being broadcast to people standing nearby.
That directional audio approach addresses a long-standing complaint about amplified sound: leakage. Conventional hearing aids and open speakers can bleed noise into a room, which makes wearers self-conscious in meetings, restaurants and on transit. Legato's frames are built to keep the sound field contained to the user.
Legato joins a small but growing group of companies betting that consumers will accept computers on their faces. Meta has shipped camera-equipped Ray-Ban smart glasses since 2023, and Amazon introduced its Echo Frames audio glasses in 2019. Legato's pitch differs: it is selling a medical-adjacent device, not a voice assistant or camera, and targeting the roughly 1.5 billion people worldwide the World Health Organization estimates live with some degree of hearing loss.
That market has historically been served by prescription hearing aids, which in the United States cost an average of $2,000 to $4,000 per pair and are rarely covered by insurance. The FDA opened the door to cheaper options in October 2022 when it created a new over-the-counter hearing aid category, allowing adults with mild to moderate hearing loss to buy amplification devices without a prescription, fitting or audiologist visit.
Legato has not disclosed pricing for the glasses in its announcement, leaving a key question unanswered for buyers weighing them against over-the-counter hearing aids that now sell for as little as a few hundred dollars. The company also did not detail battery life, prescription lens compatibility or whether the glasses carry any regulatory clearance as a hearing aid.
Startups in this category face a hardware problem that software companies avoid: glasses must be light enough to wear all day, hold a charge through it, and look like something a person would actually put on in public. Legato's open-ear frames are its answer to the last of those, keeping the device's electronics inside a form factor millions of people already wear daily.
The glasses are available now through Legato, the company said. It did not say how many units it has manufactured or when it expects to ship orders.
