Harvard duo behind facial recognition glasses launching always-on speech recording

Last year, a pair of Harvard students gained widespread media attention when they modified Meta’s smart glasses to search people’s identities with facial recognition. The duo, now Harvard dropouts, has recently presented a new project: A pair of smart glasses that listens to conversations and displays relevant information with the help of AI chatbots, giving the user “superhuman intelligence.”

The wearable device is currently being made by a startup called Halo, co-founded by AnhPhu Nguyen Caine Ardayfio. It is supposed to help you “never use your brain again,” according to Nguyen.

The glasses listen to, record and transcribe every conversation with the help of speech recognition software provided by Sonoix that understands over 60 languages. The system relies on Google’s Gemini and Perplexity Large Language Models (LLMs) and sends answers to any questions to a waveguide display, which is not visible to anyone except the user.

“They can answer any question, translate any language in real time, do math instantly (e.g., 382×193), and give you perfect memory of everything you’ve ever talked about,” the company explains on its website.

Called Halo X, the glasses are available for pre-order at the price of US$249 and are expected to be shipped in Q1 2026. The smart glasses will come with a display and a microphone, with Halo considering camera integration in the future.

A prototype seems to be already available. Earlier this week, the company opened up a small beta for people in sales, real estate and other client-focused roles to see how the product works in the real world. Halo envisions that the device could help people in these industries quickly recall information such as client preferences, sales data, or product specifications.

“Our AI glasses software can surface the right info, at the right time, keep track of key details, and even summarize conversations so you can focus on the person in front of you,” Nguyen says in a LinkedIn announcement.

San-Francisco-headquartered Halo has raised $1 million for its development, led by Pillar VC, with participation from Soma Capital, Village Global and Morningside Venture, according to TechCrunch. Questions related to privacy, however, are already hitting the startup.

In their 2024 smart glasses experiment, Nguyen and Ardayfio demonstrated how the integrated camera on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses could be used to capture faces of people on the street and cross-check them through face search engines such as PimEyes. While the duo claimed that the main goal of the project is to highlight privacy risks, companies such as PimEyes have argued that the two students have provided a blueprint for weaponizing readily available tools by malicious individuals.

One of the concerns raised is that the Halo X glasses do not have an indicator that could warn people they are being recorded. In several U.S. states, two-party consent laws prohibit secretly recording conversations without all participants’ permission.

Another concern is what happens with the data. Halo says that it will not store any recordings and promises that the Halo X glasses will ship with end-to-end encryption and SOC II compliance.

On its website, Sonoix explains that its speech recognition engine doesn’t store any conversations and is SOC 2 Type II–II-certified for protecting customer data.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  funding  |  generative AI  |  Halo  |  smart glasses  |  Sonoix  |  speech recognition  |  startup  |  wearables