Skip to content
NewsProduct launch

Legato launches $999 AI hearing glasses that cancel 99% of leaked sound

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Legato Frames pack on-device AI hearing assistance into eyewear arms, starting at $999 for adults with up to moderate hearing loss, with no cameras or recording.

Legato launches $999 AI hearing glasses that cancel 99% of leaked sound

An open-ear hearing aid that nobody standing next to you can hear leaking sound: that was the engineering bet behind Legato Frames, which went on sale October 1 at $999, per TechCrunch.

What shipped

Hearing assistance now lives inside the arms of a pair of glasses rather than a behind-the-ear case, per TechCrunch. The frames target adults with up to moderate hearing loss. Conventional hearing aids lean on directional microphones to isolate a single direction of sound, an approach that falls apart in a crowded restaurant. Legato's on-device AI instead separates voices from background noise, amplifying the voices and suppressing the rest. A dual-speaker system aims sound at the wearer's ear while a second speaker cancels whatever escapes, a combination Legato says cuts leaked sound by 99% just a few inches away. Nothing leaves the device for cloud processing, and there is no camera or recording, a line the company draws deliberately against camera-equipped smart glasses from Meta and others. At 34 grams with lenses, the frames run 10 to 12 hours per charge and come in three styles with prescription-lens support and Bluetooth streaming for calls and music.

A bet against stigma, not just against hearing aids

Two things keep people with mild hearing loss away from treatment: the price tag and the visible stigma of wearing a medical device. Legato's $999 starting price undercuts many prescription hearing aids, which commonly run into the thousands per ear, and routing the hardware through eyewear hides the function inside something people already wear without a second thought. Sales run through the company's own site and select U.S. eye care providers, with vision-insurance coverage available there, per TechCrunch, a channel that standard hearing aids do not get. Whether the open-ear seal holds up outside a product demo is the real test. A quiet office or a shared car ride is a much harder environment for a 99% containment claim than the hallway where it was likely measured, and any audible leakage undercuts the entire discretion pitch.

Where the team came from

Mehul Trivedi and Steve Romine founded Legato in 2024, and both built their hearing-tech credentials at Bose before that. Trivedi led the creation of Bose Frames; Romine ran Bose's hearing aids division. From there, Trivedi moved to EssilorLuxottica to work on Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, while Romine became COO of hearing care company Audicus, per TechCrunch's reporting on the launch and the company's stealth exit. That combination, one half of the pair from eyewear and one half from hearing aids, is the whole thesis of the product. The October 1 launch follows a late-August stealth exit backed by $12 million from Neotribe Ventures, Listen, and Village Global.

What to watch next

No outside lab test of the 99% sound-containment figure has surfaced yet beyond Legato's own numbers, and the company has not said whether it plans to sell outside the U.S. market it launched in. The bigger test is whether mainstream hearing-health coverage treats this as a genuine new category rather than a one-off gadget story, which will hinge on how the open-ear design performs for moderate hearing loss in ordinary, noisy rooms rather than a controlled demo.

Sources