Jung Min-ho has worked as a staff writer at The Korea Times since 2012, mostly covering social and political issues. He currently belongs to the Politics & City Desk where he covers topics such as health, labor and human rights. Prior to joining the team, he was responsible for covering North Korea and sports. His article about a biosecurity breach of Middle East respiratory syndrome won him an award from the Korea Science Journalists Association in 2016. He is also the co-author of the book, "Medical Pioneers of Korea" (2019). He served as the head of the international relations committee at the Journalists Association of Korea from 2021 to 2023.
AI-powered glasses offer real-time subtitles of Korean lectures
An international student wears artificial intelligence-powered real-time translation glasses during a lecture at Pusan National University in Busan. Courtesy of Pusan National University
By Jung Min-ho
Device maker aims to transform campus experience for international students
At Pusan National University (PNU) in the southeastern port city of Busan, an American student sits in a Korean literature class wearing what appears to be an ordinary pair of glasses. As the teacher begins to speak, English sentences appear on the lenses, line by line.
For the first time, there is no bracing for the moment of confusion and no constant worry about missing key points.
“The biggest advantage is being able to fully understand and not miss what the professor says in class,” the student told The Korea Times on condition of anonymity. “It also seems very helpful for learning advanced vocabulary or specialized terminology. If this technology becomes established, it could play a major role in helping international students acquire academic knowledge without language barriers.”
The student is one of several non-Koreans taking part in the university’s trial of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered translation glasses, part of a broader push to make campus life accessible in more languages.
A Vietnamese student taking part was especially surprised by how well the system handled everyday Vietnamese expressions, describing the translations as accurate not just in lectures but also in casual, conversational contexts.
“I think the glasses would be very helpful for Vietnamese who attend Korean-taught classes here,” the student said.
Two international students wear artificial intelligence-powered translation glasses at Pusan National University in Busan. Courtesy of Pusan National University
The AI experiment is changing conversations outside the classroom, too.
Staff at the school’s counseling center use the glasses when they speak with foreign students. The biggest benefit is being able to feel a sense of genuine communication, instead of passing a phone or tablet back and forth for translation, one counselor said.
“It’s good that I can speak with foreign students in the same room without passing a device back and forth,” the counselor said.
After collecting opinions from participants in the trial run, scheduled to finish on Feb. 13, PNU plans to evaluate the system’s usefulness and potential for broader use before deciding whether to adopt the glasses. If approved, the university plans to roll them out in classrooms, research settings and administrative services beginning in March.
Alongside the glasses, PNU is preparing AI‑based multilingual services such as automatically translated English course syllabi and multilingual website content, as the university aims to make its campus truly international, where students can follow classes and access services regardless of their first language.
The company supplying the glasses is already thinking beyond Busan. Its president says the aim is to add about five to 10 more universities this year and have the system in place at campuses across the country within the next two years.
Park Jeong-nam, president of Xpert, the company behind the glasses, believes that, if widely adopted, the glasses could transform campus life for foreign students by allowing schools to ease language requirements and better attract foreign students who are interested in studying here but lack proficiency in Korean.
“We have been in talks with several schools other than Pusan National University,” Park said.
The number of foreign students living in Korea surpassed 300,000 last year, according to government data. The Ministry of Education says it aims to make the country one of the top 10 destinations for students seeking to study overseas.
Park said his long-term goal is not just to sell more hardware, but to change how universities think about who can realistically follow Korean-taught courses.
“If real-time subtitles make it possible for foreign students with intermediate Korean skills to keep up in class, universities and education policymakers may eventually be able to lower or even remove some of the Korean-language test thresholds for admission (like TOPIK),” Park said.
That would give many struggling regional schools a new way to recruit students from abroad while still teaching mainly in Korean, amid a fall in Korea’s domestic student population, he added.
“If we can sufficiently prove that students can take classes using these glasses, then those regulations themselves might no longer be necessary,” he said.
Park acknowledged that the project has also exposed some practical hurdles, notably the original glasses’ 98-gram weight and limited battery life, which forces students to pause their studies periodically when recharging the devices.
To address this, the company has developed a much lighter 49-gram model that sends most of the processing work to a paired smartphone over Bluetooth and can use an auxiliary battery pack. Park says this new design should make the glasses comfortable to wear for long periods and reliable enough that universities can treat them as a standard part of campus teaching.
Initially, the technology was developed to help people who are deaf or hard of hearing. But Park later saw opportunities for its Korean speech-to-text engine — estimated by a state-recognized institution to have an accuracy of about 98.1 percent — to be used for students at universities and beyond. He said its Korean-to-English recognition currently stands at about 96.2 percent and scores for Chinese and Japanese are in the low 90s, adding that as the system is trained on more field-specific vocabulary from classrooms, its accuracy is expected to improve further.