Smart glasses have always been received with mixed sentiments. CNET's resident smart glass expert, Scott Stein, admits that, even 10 years in, the category still feels "strange and new."
I've had my own mix of excitement and skepticism about smart glasses. Given that I spend a lot of time with smart home technology and kitchen appliances, it was only a matter of time before cooking with smart glasses piqued my interest enough to try it.
For my test run, I'm using a sample pair of the Solos AirGo A5 Hydro 8 audio glasses, complete with prescription lenses, since 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 the glasses held 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.)
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