First, they showed the world how easy it is to add facial recognition to Meta's smart glasses. Now, they're making their own pair of smart specs. Former Harvard students Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen this week announced Halo, a startup of roughly 11 people working to develop always-recording smart glasses. The pair dropped out of Harvard to develop Halo X, smart glasses with a display on the lens that can answer any question someone asks. Powered by a combination of Google's Gemini and Perplexity large language models, the idea is that these glasses will always be listening to the world around you via the built-in microphones (there won't be a camera in this first model.) If someone asks, “What's the capital of Peru?” just look at the display on the glasses, and you'll be able to see the answer. At least that's the idea. The processing will still run from your phone. “We're trying to build smart glasses that make people super intelligent,” Ardayfio tells WIRED. If you have a pair of smart glasses from Even Realities, you can give the startup's Halo app a spin (it's in beta). But the plan is for Halo to craft a custom pair by the first quarter of 2026, with an estimated cost between $300 and $500. Courtesy of Halo AI-powered always-on recording wearables are having a moment in 2025—Amazon recently acquired one such startup called Bee AI, which makes a wrist-worn always-recording wearable. These devices transcribe the people around you, and often summarize your day, with the ability to extrapolate tasks and insights from your conversations. Halo X will have these features too—you can talk to it like you would a voice assistant—but its focus is on speedily delivering answers to questions during real-life conversations. The company claims it can respond to most queries in 900 milliseconds or less, and web-searched queries in under 2.5 seconds. Much of the processing will happen in the cloud on Halo's servers with standard encryption, and Halo says it will never train on, share, or sell your conversations. Should you tell the people you're around that your glasses are recording conversations, even if no audio files are stored? “The onus is on the user to responsibly use it just like any other AI note taker," Nguyen says. Halo has been in development for only eight weeks, and the company has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding. The duo is working at breakneck speed because the smart glasses space is moving very fast. “Every big company understands that wearables are potentially the next computing interface," Nguyen says. "Startups have that advantage that if we ship fast and move fast, and still do it as high quality, we can quickly gain market share.”