Ever since the days of the original Google Glass, I've had a mix of excitement and skepticism about smart glasses. With multiple promising products on the market, I decided to throw my hat into the ring to see if smart glasses could work for me. Given that I spend a lot of time around smart home gear and kitchen appliances, what better way to test smart glasses than to see how they hold up in the kitchen?
For this test, I'm using a sample of the Solos AirGo A5 Hydro 8 audio glasses -- complete with prescription lenses because I'm useless without corrective eyewear. I approached this smart glasses cooking challenge from three angles:
Basic cooking advice, like the science of food and identifying mystery produce Cooking a known recipe from a cookbook and finding appropriate dishes to complete a meal Learning a new recipe and checking it against the purported online source
Let's see how they hold up.
About the Solos AirGo A5
Solos provided a sample pair with a prescription identical to that of my normal glasses. John Carlsen/CNET
Before I jump into each task, I would like to discuss the smart glasses I used and their capabilities. For this challenge, I used the Solos AirGo A5 smart glasses, which come with a companion app that essentially functions as an AI chatbot. The model I used doesn't have a built-in display or camera; instead, it relies on the Solos app for those functions.
Originally, I planned to use the default chatbot instructions but it sometimes refused to help with cooking. Instead, I used Google Gemini to create chatbot instructions specific to cooking -- with some flexibility to answer other questions. (While I have some experience with AI chatbot programming, fitting appropriate instructions into a character limit is a tall order for a verbose writer like myself.)
Unfortunately, the Solos prescription feels off for my left eye, so I'm unable to wear the glasses while working on my computer. Thankfully, the difference wasn't an issue when cooking. John Carlsen/CNET
Solos has a few options for chatbots: GPT 4o Mini (Azure or OpenAI), Claude 3 Haiku and Gemini 2.0 Flash. (I settled on the Gemini bot because it's the platform I'm most familiar with.) This means that my experiment is ultimately more about cooking with AI than with smart glasses -- Solos (or any other brand with similar features) is merely a tool for speaking with a chatbot.
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