is a senior reporter and author of the Optimizer newsletter.She has more than 13 years of experience reporting on wearables, health tech, and more. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they’re going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here. We’ll be off for the next two weeks and back on November 7th.
As I wrote last week, I’m rapidly running out of body parts to do my job. Part of being human is knowing when to ask for help, so a few months ago, I enlisted senior editor Sean Hollister — a fellow smart glasses nerd — to help me test Halo Glass, an always-listening AI companion that lives inside a pair of glasses.
Halo is the brainchild of two former Harvard students who made headlines last year after they rigged a pair of Ray-Ban Metas to dox strangers in real time. In August, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio announced they were making a pair of always-on AI glasses that could listen to, record, transcribe, and then organically feed you the answers to questions relevant to your real-time conversations. It’s sort of a mix between Cluely, another AI startup that aims to help you “cheat on everything,” and Bee, an AI wearable that claims to act as your second memory. Instead of a pin or wristband, this lets you view answers discreetly inside a pair of smart glasses.
So of course I wanted to test them.
Sean and I chatted with Ardayfio, who told us that while Halo will eventually make its own hardware, for now, we’d be among the first to experience their app running on the Even Realities G1 Glasses. You may not have heard of Even Realities, but it was among the more impressive smart glasses makers at CES. All we’d have to do is try out the prototype, compare notes, and then write up our experience. Easy, right?
Nope.
Some of the confusion is the Halo Glass prototype is using third-party hardware. That led to some annoying troubleshooting.
The appeal to both of us was having a second memory. We are busy, occasionally forgetful people. Wouldn’t life — and our jobs — be a tad easier if we stopped forgetting that one thing we told our colleagues, bosses, and spouses we’d do? Wouldn’t interviewing sources be easier if, when they used an esoteric term, a definition might pop up in real time without having to break the flow of conversation?
It sure sounds nice, but always-on AI wearables present a boatload of ethical conundrums. Since this is an entirely new product category, the ethics of it all took us a bit by surprise. For starters, Sean lives in California — a state that legally requires both parties to consent to recording a conversation. Is he committing a crime if he wears these glasses without disclosing to everyone around him that he’s recording? And Sean’s wife has a job that requires confidentiality. An always-on recording device could jeopardize her livelihood if Sean forgets to turn it off while she’s working and he’s nearby. As a result, Sean couldn’t actually test these glasses at home. Meanwhile, my spouse is royally fed up with always-listening AI wearables after I reviewed Bee and it transcribed one of our fights. (To test Friend, I had to wear it outside the home.) Our solution was for each of us to wear a pair of the G1 glasses running Halo and to hop on a video call to test it with each other.
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