The Nuance Audio smart glasses designed to help those with hearing loss have gained FDA approval, meaning they can be explicitly sold OTC in the US for that purpose.
The EssilorLuxottica brand’s glasses are prescription specs with a built-in hearing aid. However, by combining a beamforming microphone array positioned on the front of the frames with open-ear speakers, the glasses can raise the volume of the person you’re talking to.
The Nuance Audio glasses are designed to help some of the 1.2bn people EssilorLuxottica estimates suffer from low-level hearing loss and struggle to follow conversations in busy rooms. And with this latest approval, they can begin that journey.
The company says the glasses will be available in the US in Q1. After receiving similar EU CE approval for the Medical Devices bracket, the smart specs will also arrive in Italy, France, Germany, and the UK in H1 2025.

No official pricing details have been released (at least at the time of writing). However, when we had a demo of the Nuance Audio at CES last year, we were told they would cost around a quarter of a traditional pair of hearing aids. Estimates vary dramatically on the average price of hearing aids in the US, but we believe this would place the glasses in the $500-$1,000 bracket.
We were also very impressed by them during our initial try-on. Our tester James Stables said: “The first thing to note is that the latency is exceptional, and, when you think about it, really impressive. There’s no lag between hearing the person’s words and watching their lips move.”
However, at the time, we also expressed some concern about the tinny sound compared to industry leader Ray-Ban Meta, and the distortion as the beamforming mics settled. If EssilorLuxxotica has managed to iron out those issues in the year since, Nuance Audio could become one of 2025’s most genuinely helpful wearables.
Watch this space, as we’ll be looking to test them out once they get closer to a full release.