Two former Harvard students will launch “always on” AI-powered smart glasses that listen, record, and transcribe all conversations and display relevant information in real time.
“Our goal is to create glasses that make you extremely intelligent the moment you put them,” said Anhphu Nguyen, co-founder of Halo, a technology startup.
Or, as his co-founder Caine Ardayfio said, glasses “give endless memories.”
“AI listens to every conversation you have and uses that knowledge to tell you what to say… just like an IRL,” Ardayfio told TechCrunch, referring to a startup that claims to help users “cheat” everything from job interviews to school exams.
“Someone says complicated words, ‘What is the 37 of the third power?’ or something like that, and it pops up on your glasses,” added Ardayfio.
Ardayfio and Nguyen have raised $1 million to develop glasses led by Pillar VC, with support from Soma Capital, Village Global and Morningside Venture. The glasses will cost $249 and pre-orders will be available starting Wednesday. Ardayfio called the glasses “the first real step towards thinking about atmosphere.”
The two Ivy League dropouts, who moved to their own version of the hacker hostel in the San Francisco Bay Area, have recently sparked a stir after developing a facial recognition app for Meta’s smart Ray-Ban glasses to prove that the technology can be used by people. As an early competitor of Meta’s smart glasses, Ardayfio said that given the history of the security and privacy scandal, Meta had to curb its products in a way that Halo could ultimately take advantage of.
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“Meta doesn’t have a big reputation for caring for users’ privacy. Releasing something they’re always with you – obviously bringing a ton of utilities is a risk of a big reputation for them probably before they do it on a big scale,” Nguyen added.
And while Nguyen has a point, users may not yet have a good reason to trust the technology of several college students who aim to send people out into the world with secret recording devices.
Meta’s glasses have indicator lights when viewing or hearing as a mechanism to warn others that the camera and microphone are being recorded, but Halo Glasses, known as Halo X, said there is no external indicator to warn people about customer recordings.
“Because of the hardware we’re making, I want to be as careful as regular glasses,” Ardayfio said.
Privacy advocates warn about normalizing secret recording devices in public places.
“Small and careful recording devices are nothing new,” Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told TechCrunch.
“In a way, this sounds like a variation on the microphone spy pen,” Galperin said. “However, in many situations, users need to get everyone’s consent within the recording distance, and we expect the privacy we have for conversations in all kinds of spaces, so we think users need everyone’s consent.”
There are several states in the United States that make it illegal to secretly record conversations without the consent of others. Ardayfio said they know this but it’s up to the customer to get their consent before using glasses.
“We trust that if a user is in a two-party consent state, they will obtain consent,” Ardayfio said, referring to 12 US laws that require the consent of all recorded parties.
“I’m also very concerned about where the recorded data is kept, how it is stored, and who can access it,” added Galperin.
Ardayfio said Halo relies on Soniox for audio transcription, which it claims does not store recordings. Nguyen claimed that once the finished product is released to a customer it will be end-to-end encrypted, but no evidence was provided as to how this would work. He also pointed out that Halo is aiming to obtain SOC 2 compliance. This means that it is independently audited to demonstrate proper protection of customer data. No completed SOC 2 compliance dates are provided.
Still, the two students are not used to controversial projects that fall into privacy.
While at Harvard last year, Ardayfio and Nguyen developed I-Xray, a demo project that adds facial recognition capabilities to Metaray-Ban’s smart glasses, showing that technology can be easily bolted to devices that identify people.
The duo never released the code behind I-Xray, but without consent they tested the glasses with random passersby. In the demo video, Ardayfio showed that glasses detect faces and pull up strangers’ personal information within seconds. The video featured the reactions of doxed people.
In an interview with 404 media, they acknowledged the risk. “Some guys just find the address of a girl’s home on the train and follow it to her house,” Nguyen told the Tech News website.
For now, the Halo X Glasses only have a display and microphone, but no cameras, but two are investigating the possibility of adding them to future models.
According to Nguyen, users need to make their smartphones convenient to promote the power of their glasses and get “real-time information prompts and answers to questions.” Glasses manufactured by another company that the startup didn’t name, are connected to the accompanying apps on the owner’s phone. There, glasses essentially outsource computing because they don’t have enough power to do that on the device itself.
Under the hood, Smart Glasses uses Google’s Gemini and Prperxity as chatbot engines, according to the two co-founders. Gemini are good for mathematics and reasoning, but they use confusion to scrape the internet, they said.
During an interview, TechCrunch asked if he knew their glasses when the next season of “The Witcher” would come out. Responding in a way reminiscent of C-3PO, Ardayfio states: “The Witcher season 4 will be released on Netflix in 2025, but there is no exact date yet. Most sources hope for that in the second half of 2025. ”
“I don’t know if that’s correct,” he added.
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