Halo smartglasses promise to see, hear, and remember your life as it happens

The Halo smartglasses, the latest release from Brilliant Labs, aren’t being promoted as a lifestyle-focused competitor to the Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses, but are instead being sold on the presence of the company’s AI, and how it can remember the things you may otherwise forget.

Brilliant Labs’ AI, called Noa, along with its Narrative memory mode will apparently remember “what you see, hear, and say” according to the company’s blurb on its memory function. Furthermore, it’ll do so not for days or weeks, but for years. In addition to remembering, it’ll also be able to use reasoning to understand what may be useful in the future, and what is worth forgetting.

In the announcement, the company repeatedly states your interactions will be private, and that Noa will be a trusted agent, but it has not gone into great detail about what this means. Enabling the AI’s memory is an optical sensor and a set of microphones with audio detection, plus there are bone-conducting speakers for the AI to speak through.

Smart glasses with a screen

Unusually, the Halo also has a color projection screen, set at the top of the frame on the inside. By using a simple screen, low power components, and omitting features like Wi-Fi, Brilliant Labs claims the battery will last for about 14 hours of normal use on a single charge, so plenty for a day’s worth of remembering stuff.

The design is simple, and the frames weigh just 40 grams, so they should suit a variety of faces, but it’s a shame to see only black as the single color option. Brilliant Labs has partnered with SmartBuyGlasses to offer prescription lenses.

While Ray-Ban Meta and the Oakley Meta smart glasses will appeal to a very different crowd to the Halo, it doesn’t mean they have the market to themselves. Solos has a wide range of AI-enabled smart glasses, in various styles, and with or without cameras. The Even Realities Even G1 has a geekier design but a lot of functionality, and Halliday’s recently crowdfunded smart glasses also have similar AI functionality and a projection screen.

If you like the look of the Brilliant Labs Halo smartglasses, they’re available to pre-order now for $299, and are expected to ship before the end of the year. The AI has two tiers, with the basic, free tier providing “cost optimized” performance with a daily limit, and a subscription Plus tier for the full memory and conversational experience. Unfortunately, Brilliant Labs has not announced how much the Plus tier will cost yet, so do consider this before buying.