Harvard Dropouts Launch Controversial AI-Powered Smart Glasses with Always-On Recording

Harvard dropouts to launch 'always on' AI smart glasses that listen and record every conversation | TechCrunch

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."

Meta glasses hackers have new AI specs that listen, respond

Digitally enabled omniscience is neat, if you can bear the cost of being constantly monitored by an AI agent The headline-making Harvard duo who turned a pair of Meta smart glasses into a privacy violation machine last year now have their own pair of smart specs to sell, which they tell The Register will make people "super intelligent" by listening in on their conversations 24/7 and offering unsolicited feedback. Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen on Tuesday opened preorders for Halo X, a pair of smart glasses they designed that, while not equipped with a camera like a pair of Meta Ray-Bans, do include a heads-up display. The display and some embedded microphones, combined with an agentic AI that is purportedly able to digest what the glasses hear, mean that the frames are able to respond with information they deem relevant to the wearer's current circumstances. "The moment you put them on, you can answer literally any question," Nguyen told us in an interview. "You could ask, what's the top three GDPs in the world, or what date Christopher Columbus set sail - stuff like that....You could know any fact about any field from economics, history and more." To be clear, Nguyen and Ardayfio are still working through their own hardware development process, and told The Register that they're currently deciding between three vendors for the final product, concept images of which appear in this article. There are about 20 testers in the Silicon Valley area wearing beta versions, which are running on unspecified third-party hardware. But a social media video Halo published over the summer shows a beta pair of the glasses being used in public, as well as simulated imagery of using the glasses. As designed, the glasses transmit audio via a Bluetooth Low Energy connection to a paired iPhone running the Halo app, which transmits transcribed requests to Halo's cloud platform for processing. While they told us that transcripts and summaries are stored locally on the paired device, all AI processing is done in the cloud. Ardayfio told us that using a combination of models from providers, including Google and Perplexity, allows Halo to balance "speed, cost, and contextual reasoning." The display in the glasses is able to show around four lines of text at roughly 40 characters per line - not much, but Ardayfio described it as a happy medium of optimization "for quick, glanceable prompts rather than long passages." As nothing but a screen, the Halo X glasses themselves lack much in the way of control. Ardayfio said that the only thing one can do on the glasses themselves is nod upward to bring up a dashboard that displays time, calendar events, and the like. Everything else is done from the paired smartphone. Nguyen and Ardayfio told us that queries requiring an internet search can take the glasses up to two seconds, while some questions - like asking the weather - can be answered within a few hundred milliseconds. The glasses themselves don't do much in the way of heavy AI lifting, with Ardayfio describing them more as a display for the larger AI system. Searching the web for fun facts isn't all that the glasses can do. They also create a repository of everything they've heard, and if prompted, can provide AI summaries of past conversations, reminders of things said in meetings, and the like. For instance, if you were to ask them, "Tell me what my wife and I decided about our daughter's college tuition on Saturday," the glasses would send a request to the cloud storage service searching for the conversation text, summarize it, and present the summary as text on the display. As designed and demonstrated, Halo X doesn't even listen for a prompt word - it's simply supposed to be smart enough to understand whether something was meant for it and come up with the appropriate response. What that means, naturally, is that Halo X is always listening, always recording and still sometimes gets it wrong. "Our custom AI agent listens to your whole day," Nguyen explained, "and every sentence you say goes to the AI so it can figure out if it should help you at this given time and what it should help you with." As for the noise (and privacy intrusion) of recording every sound heard in a public space, Ardayfio told us the glasses are designed to focus on the wearer, with background speech typically ignored. "The glasses continuously check whether what you've said merits a response," Ardayfio said in an emailed statement. "We've been training the system with human feedback to improve when it should and shouldn't intervene. It's not perfect yet, but we've seen steady improvement with this approach." Eventually, the designers envision the glasses getting enough training to become polite and useful assistants instead of hardware that might sometimes step in when not desired. "We want our technology to disappear completely. We don't want to make just another smart watch, but a second brain that feels like intuition," Nguyen said. If Halo X manages to get there, it could be quite useful at work - no one could say they didn't volunteer to lead that project or skirt responsibility for a bad idea ever again. The pair told us that they're considering enterprise users and have been talking to people in that space to see what their needs might be, but had nothing to share yet. When we last spoke to Ardayfio and Nguyen in 2024, they had just demonstrated software that captured video streams from Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses and fed them through AI that gathered in-depth dossiers on anyone unfortunate enough to get within eye line. Given their prior work, instant, in-your-eyes information retrieval makes sense. However, it comes with privacy complications. Halo X's AI agent can be disabled via the paired mobile phone app (available for iOS, but is unlikely to come to Android "for a long time," per Ardayfio), but if you want it to be more than a pair of glasses that slowly drains a battery without providing a service, you'll have to let the AI agent listen. Constantly. If that seems like a privacy nightmare to you, you're not alone. Ardayfio and Nguyen have plans to address those concerns, naturally. "An AI that knows everything about you can be super useful," Nguyen said. "But privacy is a huge problem." The AI glasses one can preorder from Halo beginning on Tuesday will ship with software that offers end-to-end encryption, Nguyen said, "so no one can read your conversations except you." While not implemented in their testing yet, Ardayfio said encryption will happen at the glasses at the point of capture, while stored, and while in transit. In other words, if it's implemented correctly, Halo X glasses transcripts should be accessible only to the person who created them on their smartphone and the screen of their glasses. Halo said it's also working to achieve SOC 2 compliance. As for whether there might be privacy concerns around Halo X users recording everything they hear in public for digestion and indexing by an AI, that's not on them, Nguyen told us. "At the end of the day, from Zoom notetakers to iPhone voice memos, the onus is on the end user to ask for proper consent," Nguyen said. "We expect users to use the product in a responsible manner, getting consent from others they interact with, just like any other meeting notetaker." The difference between Zoom notetakers and Halo X, however, is that the latter is designed to be on at all times and in all places. So are users going to turn it off when they're out in public, ask the waiter at the restaurant and the cashier at the grocery store for recording consent, or just keep it on and forget about everyone else's wishes? And what if you live in California, which requires both parties to consent to being recorded? After three weeks of testing, the results have been positive, but not perfect. "It's early days, but the feedback is super promising," Nguyen said. "Professionals have generally loved it because they already use note-taking software now but this one works everywhere." "I think there's still a lot of work to be done on the AI, though," Nguyen continued. That's not to say that the AI is stupid. Instead, early testers simply wanted it to be a bit better at figuring out how, with what, and when to assist users. "There's so many different ways people want to be assisted," Nguyen added. "So we're still thinking of ways to improve how to control it." One possibility, the pair explained, would be adding the ability for users to edit the master AI prompt for the Halo agent to tell it to only respond in certain circumstances. If you want to give an ever-listening pair of AI glasses a try, you can preorder them now for $249, though you shouldn't expect them to ship until early next year. Just don't be surprised if some people stop talking in your presence. ®

Harvard Dropouts Unveil Smart Glasses That Can Continuously Record Audio

Halo X comes with a smart display where users can read AI's responses Halo X, a new artificial intelligence (AI) smart glasses with a display, was unveiled by the newly formed startup Halo on Wednesday. The company is pitching its glasses as a device that gives users "superhuman intelligence." The core idea is that the smart glasses, equipped with a microphone, continuously record their surrounding. This enables users to instantly recall any previous conversation or information said to the device. Users can also ask the AI chatbot questions, and it is said to present the information in text format on the display. Halo X Smartglasses Feature a Display and Microphone Interestingly, the Co-Founders of the startup, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, are the same Harvard dropouts who developed the I-Xray app and integrated it with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The app went viral because of a demo posted by Nguyen, where he highlighted how the smart glasses technology can be used to doxx (the act of revealing personal information about someone without their consent) people. Now, according to a TechCrunch report, the duo has created a pair of glasses which themselves pose a privacy risk to others. These smart glasses are reportedly equipped with a microphone that can continuously record the surroundings, including anything the owner and anyone around them says. The device is said to record audio, transcribe it, and then delete the audio file. However, the device lacks any indicator to let others know that they're being recorded. "For the hardware we're making, we want it to be discreet, like normal glasses," Ardayfio told the publication. The Co-Founder reportedly added that they were trusting the buyers to seek consent in regions and countries where recording someone without consent is illegal. The device reportedly has dual AI systems working and powering the chatbot. Google's Gemini is said to be used to power the conversational, mathematical, and reasoning-based tasks, whereas Perplexity is powering tasks where information has to be pulled from the Internet. Notably, Halo X lacks a camera and speakers, and the only medium of output is the text appearing on the smart display. The website claims the device to be "private by design," highlighting that the smart glasses do not train on, share, or sell any of the users' conversations. Halo X is priced at $249, and shipping it to India will cost Rs. 22,521 (direct conversion and an additional four percent conversion fee). Currently, the smart glasses are available for pre-order, and shipping is expected to start in the first quarter of 2026.