Smart glasses have earned both praise and skepticism from the public and tech insiders alike. CNET's Scott Stein, who has covered the category for a decade, admits it still feels "strange and new."
I've shared the same push-and-pull of excitement and doubt. But given how much time I spend with smart home technology and kitchen appliances, it was only a matter of time before curiosity got the better of me and I brought a pair into the kitchen.
As an experienced home cook with an eye for useful tech, cooking with smart glasses has always piqued my interest. It's one of the ways smart glasses manufacturers, including Meta and Solos, have marketed their connected frames, so I figured I'd give this new-fangled cooking accessory a crack.
For this test, I used 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.
Here's how it went.
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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