Our Story

The idea for Xander came from one of the lowest points in co-founder and CEO Alex Westner’s life—after he was diagnosed with a form of macular degeneration. Unnerved by the possibility of losing his vision, while at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI), he learned about several impactful products, like Orcam and Be My Eyes, that use sensory substitution—sound to augment low vision. At the time, no products that used sight to augment hearing loss existed. Alex studied audio engineering, specializing in the cocktail party problem and he earned an MS from the MIT Media Lab, training computers to differentiate individual voices from other sounds. He spent 18 years as a product leader in audio technology companies, developing and shipping award-winning software products at Cakewalk and iZotope, including iZotope Rx, which analyzed and separated sound and speech.

He wondered if he could apply his audio expertise to caption live speech, so people who could not hear or understand spoken words (and did not sign) could participate in conversations in real time. A couple of years later, while at MEEI for vision monitoring, he visited audiology, and talked with a specialist about his idea and he encouraged Alex to “caption the world.”