TWO former Harvard students are launching a pair of “always-on” AI-powered smart glasses that listen to, record, and transcribe every conversation and then display relevant information to the wearer in real time.

“Our goal is to make glasses that make you super intelligent the moment you put them on,” said AnhPhu Nguyen, co-founder of Halo, a startup that’s developing the technology. Or, as his co-founder Caine Ardayfio put it, the glasses “give you infinite memory.”

“The AI listens to every conversation you have and uses that knowledge to tell you what to say … kinda like IRL Cluely,” said Ardayfio, referring to the startup that claims to help users “cheat” on everything from job interviews to school exams.

“If somebody says a complex word or asks you a question, like, ‘What’s 37 to the third power?’ or something like that, then it’ll pop up on the glasses,” Ardayfio added.

Ardayfio and Nguyen have raised US$1 million to develop the glasses, led by Pillar VC, with support from Soma Capital, Village Global, and Morningside Venture. The glasses will be priced at US$249 and is available for preorder starting Wednesday. Ardayfio called the glasses “the first real step towards vibe thinking.”

The two Ivy League dropouts, who have since moved into their own version of the Hacker Hostel in the San Francisco Bay Area, recently caused a stir after developing a facial-recognition app for Meta’s smart Ray-Ban glasses to prove that the tech could be used to dox people. As a potential early competitor to Meta’s smart glasses, Ardayfio said Meta, given its history of security and privacy scandals, had to rein in its product in ways that Halo can ultimately capitalize on.

“Meta doesn’t have a great reputation for caring about user privacy, and for them to release something that’s always there with you — which obviously brings a ton of utility — is just a huge reputational risk for them that they probably won’t take before a startup does it at scale first,” Nguyen added.

While Meta’s glasses have an indicator light when their cameras and microphones are watching and listening as a mechanism to warn others that they are being recorded, Ardayfio said that the Halo glasses, dubbed Halo X, do not have an external indicator to warn people of their customers’ recording.

“For the hardware we’re making, we want it to be discreet, like normal glasses,” said Ardayfio, who added that the glasses record every word, transcribe it, and then delete the audio file.

There are several states in the U.S. that make it illegal to covertly record conversations without the other persons’ consent. Ardayfio said they are aware of this but that it is up to their customer to obtain consent before using the glasses.

Ardayfio said Halo relies on Soniox for audio transcription, which claims to never store recordings. Nguyen claimed when the finished product is released to customers, it will be end-to-end encrypted but provided no evidence of how this would work. (SD-Agencies)