After attempting to do too much too soon with Google Glass back in 2014, smart glasses have scaled back their ambitions in recent years.
Prioritizing aesthetics and subtlety, the more successful smart glasses — like the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses — are no longer computers on the face, but regular glasses with a speaker, a camera and some basic voice controls for capturing life’s unmissable moments.
But innovative features are coming back. A couple of months ago, Meta rolled out an AI upgrade for its Ray-Bans, letting the built-in AI provide insights on what can be seen through the camera at any given time, and now another company is planning similarly intelligent smart glasses using the recent AI vision upgrades found in ChatGPT 4o.
The Solos AirGo Vision is an upgrade to the existing AirGo 3, which already uses ChatGPT to translate speech on the fly. With this new version, the firm introduces a camera in the frames that can not only capture photos and video, but recognize both people and objects with a little help from ChatGPT’s new vision features.
That means you can ask your smart glasses for information about what you’re looking at, or even request directions based on a visible landmark. There’s no screen — in that scenario, the glasses would simply deliver direction prompts via a built-in speaker, saving you from pulling up Google Maps on your phone.
This is just scratching the surface of possible functionality, with the company claiming that the camera could also track progress on activities like cooking and home improvement, providing the next steps along the way. While shopping, you could show your glasses a product, and ask whether there’s a better-priced option elsewhere — though if you’re wearing smart glasses worth hundreds of dollars when buying groceries, then you may not be the most frugal person around.
One especially interesting feature is that the Sonos AirGo Vision maintain the swappable frame system as the company’s other glasses. That means you can swap in a set without a camera if you don’t need the functionality, or if you’re going somewhere that might refuse entry, such as a theater or the cinema.
With a camera-free set of frames attached, you’ll still be able to use ChatGPT’s other functions — just nothing involving the disconnected cameras. And the camera says that the glasses can be integrated with Google Gemini and Athropic’s Claude AI models if you prefer them to Open AI’s ChatGPT.
AirGo Vision is expected later this year, with no pricing information available as of yet. Given a version without the cameras will go on sale for $249.99 next month, it’ll almost certainly be more than that, but with Meta’s Ray-Bans starting at $299, we’d expect the Solos’ alternative to be roughly in that ballpark.
