A rendering of the Halo AI smart glasses. (Image: Halo) | Image Credits:Halo
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 the startup that’s developing the technology, called Halo.
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,” Ardayfio told TechCrunch, 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 $1 million to develop the glasses led by Pillar VC, with support from Soma Capital, Village Global, and Morningside Venture. The glasses will be available for pre-order at $249 starting Wednesday. Ardayfio called the glasses “the first real step towards vibe thinking.”
The two Ivy League drop outs, 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.
And while Nguyen has a point, users may not yet have a good reason to trust the technology of a couple of college-aged students purporting to send people out into the world with covert recording equipment.
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.
Privacy advocates are warning about the normalization of covert recording devices in public.
“Small and discreet recording devices are not new,” Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told TechCrunch.
“In some ways, this sounds like a variation on the microphone spy pen,” said Galperin. “But I think that normalizing the use of an always-on recording device, which in many circumstances would require the user to get the consent of everyone within recording distance, eats away at the expectation of privacy we have for our conversations in all kinds of spaces.”
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.
“We trust our users to get consent if they are in a two party consent state,” said Ardayfio, referring to the laws of a dozen U.S. states that require the consent of all recorded parties.
“I would also be very concerned about where the recorded data is being kept, how it is being stored, and who has access to it,” Galperin added.
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. He also noted that Halo is aiming to get SOC 2 compliance, which means it has been independently audited and demonstrates adequate protection of customer data. A date for the completed SOC 2 compliance was not provided.
Still, the two students are not new to privacy-invasive controversial projects.
While still at Harvard last year, Ardayfio and Nguyen developed I-XRAY, a demo project that added facial recognition capabilities to the Meta Ray-Ban’s smart glasses, demonstrating how easily the tech could be bolted onto a device not meant to identify people.
The duo never released the code behind I-XRAY, but they did test the glasses on random passers-by without consent. In a demo video, Ardafyio showed the glasses detecting faces and pulling up personal information of strangers within seconds. The video featured reactions of people who were doxed.
In an interview with 404 Media, they acknowledged the risks: “Some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told the tech news website.
For now, Halo X glasses only have a display and a microphone, but no camera, although the two are exploring the possibility of adding it to a future model.
Users still need to have their smartphones handy to help power the glasses and get “real time info prompts and answers to questions,” per Nguyen. The glasses, which are manufactured by another company that the startup didn’t name, are tethered to an accompanying app on the owner’s phone, where the glasses essentially outsource the computing since they don’t have enough power to do it on the device itself.
Under the hood, the smart glasses uses Google’s Gemini and Perplexity as its chatbot engine, according to the two co-founders. Gemini is better for math and reasoning, whereas they use Perplexity to scrape the internet, they said.
During an interview, TechCrunch asked if their glasses knew when the next season of “The Witcher” would come out. Responding in a way reminiscent of C-3PO, Ardayfio said: “‘The Witcher’ season four will be released on Netflix in 2025, but there’s no exact date yet. Most sources expect it in the second half of 2025.”
