Two former Harvard students are launching a pair of “always-on” AI-powered smartglasses. The glasses are designed to listen to, record, and transcribe every conversation, then display relevant information to the wearer in real time. AnhPhu Nguyen, co-founder of the startup Halo, stated their goal is to create glasses that make you super intelligent the moment you put them on. His co-founder, Caine Ardayfio, described the glasses as a tool that gives you infinite memory.
The AI listens to every conversation and uses that knowledge to suggest what to say, similar to a real-time guide. Ardayfio explained that if someone uses a complex word or asks a question, the answer will pop up on the glasses’ display. The founders have raised one million dollars to develop the technology, led by Pillar VC with support from Soma Capital, Village Global, and Morningside Venture. The glasses will be available for pre-order starting at two hundred and forty-nine dollars. Ardayfio called them the first real step towards what he terms “vibe thinking.”
These Ivy League dropouts, who now live in a hacker hostel in the San Francisco Bay Area, recently caused concern after developing a facial recognition app for Meta’s smart Ray-Ban glasses. That project proved the technology could be used to identify and dox strangers. As a potential early competitor to Meta, Ardayfio believes Meta’s history of security and privacy scandals forces them to be cautious, an area where Halo can capitalize.
Nguyen noted that Meta’s poor reputation for user privacy presents a huge reputational risk for them, one a startup is more willing to take. However, users may not have a good reason to trust technology from college-aged students that involves covert recording equipment. Unlike Meta’s glasses, which have an indicator light to warn others they are being recorded, the Halo X glasses do not have an external indicator. Ardayfio stated the design is intended to be discreet, like normal glasses, and that the audio is transcribed and then the original recording is deleted.
Privacy advocates are warning about the normalization of such covert recording devices in public. Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, compared the concept to a microphone spy pen. She expressed concern that normalizing always-on recording devices erodes the expectation of privacy we have for our conversations, noting that in many circumstances users are legally required to obtain consent from everyone within recording distance. Several U.S. states make it illegal to covertly record conversations without the other persons’ consent.
Ardayfio said they are aware of these laws but that it is the responsibility of their customer to obtain consent before using the glasses in a two-party consent state. Galperin also raised concerns about where the recorded data is kept, how it is stored, and who has access to it. The founders stated that Halo relies on Soniox for audio transcription, a service that claims to never store recordings. Nguyen claimed the final product will be end-to-end encrypted and that Halo is aiming for SOC 2 compliance, though no specific date for that audit was provided.
The two students are not new to privacy-invasive projects. Last year at Harvard, they developed I-XRAY, a demo that added facial recognition to Meta’s smart glasses to show how easily the technology could be used for doxxing. They never released the code but tested the glasses on random passers-by without their consent. In a demo video, the glasses pulled up personal information on strangers within seconds. In an interview, they acknowledged the risks, such as someone finding a person’s home address and following them.
Currently, the Halo X glasses only have a display and a microphone, with no camera, though the founders are exploring adding one in a future model. Users still need a smartphone to power the glasses and receive real-time information prompts. The glasses are manufactured by an unnamed company and are tethered to a phone app, which handles the computing. The smart glasses use Google’s Gemini and Perplexity as their chatbot engine; Gemini is used for math and reasoning, while Perplexity is used to scrape the internet for information.