The idea of outsourcing your memory to technology has been a science fiction trope for decades, but two former Harvard students believe they can make it an everyday reality.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the co-founders of startup Halo, have unveiled Halo X, a pair of AI-powered smart glasses designed to record, transcribe, and analyze every conversation you have, offering real-time prompts and answers to different questions, TechCrunch reported.
Nguyen and Ardayfio dropped out of Harvard to build Halo, raising $1 million in funding led by Pillar VC, with support from Soma Capital, Village Global, and Morningside Venture, according to TechCrunch. The Halo X glasses are priced at $249 and available for preorder, with the company marketing them as the first major leap into what they call "vibe thinking."
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"Our goal is to make glasses that make you super intelligent the moment you put them on," Nguyen told TechCrunch. Ardayfio added that the technology offers "infinite memory," as the glasses not only transcribe speech but also surface relevant information in real time.
The device connects to a smartphone app for processing power and integrates AI systems, including Google's Gemini for reasoning tasks and Perplexity for live web queries, TechCrunch reported.
Unlike Meta's META Ray-Ban smart glasses, which feature a light to alert people when cameras or microphones are in use, Halo X has no external indicator.
"For the hardware we're making, we want it to be discreet, like normal glasses," Ardayfio told TechCrunch. He said the glasses record audio, transcribe it, and delete the raw files after processing.
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Privacy advocates say the lack of transparency could erode public trust. "Small and discreet recording devices are not new," Electronic Frontier Foundation Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin told TechCrunch. "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."
U.S. states with two-party consent laws could also pose legal challenges. Ardayfio acknowledged the issue, saying, "We trust our users to get consent if they are in a two-party consent state."
This is not the first time Nguyen and Ardayfio have faced controversy, TechCrunch said. While still at Harvard, the pair modified Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses to demonstrate how facial recognition could identify strangers in public. The project was never released, but it showed how quickly the technology could cross privacy boundaries.
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Ardayfio now sees Halo X as a breakthrough for productivity and cognitive enhancement. "The AI listens to every conversation you have and uses that knowledge to tell you what to say," he told TechCrunch. During a demonstration, he used the glasses to answer a question about when the next season of Netflix's "The Witcher" would be released, citing 2025 as the expected date.
Nguyen told Futurism that Halo's mission is to capture and enhance everyday cognition. "We think that everyone will be recording everything about their lives in the future, because it's just so useful and helpful to their lives," he said.
He argued that Big Tech companies like Meta may avoid releasing such devices due to reputational risks, leaving startups like Halo to pioneer the space first.
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