Always On, Always Listening: The New AI Glasses That Could Be Your “Second Brain”
The market is witnessing the arrival of Halo X smart glasses — a device designed to transform everyday life into a continuous transcript. Creators Kane Ardayfio and Anfu Nguyen, known for last year’s privacy-breaching experiment with Meta Ray-Ban, have this time abandoned the camera yet retained nearly everything else. Their new creation is equipped with a display and an array of microphones that constantly capture the wearer’s speech and transmit it to the cloud. There, a specially trained AI analyzes, memorizes, and delivers prompts — unsolicited and unceasing.
Halo X extends far beyond a mere reference tool. The system remembers conversations, generates concise summaries, and can remind the user, for instance, of a discussion with a spouse regarding their daughter’s tuition fees. All it takes is a spoken query. According to the developers, the AI is designed to discern when to intervene and when to remain silent — though they concede the feature is not yet flawless. Interruptions can arrive at inopportune moments, and conclusions are not always accurate.
The glasses possess no built-in controls save for a single function: a tilt of the head upward summons a display panel with the time and calendar events. All other interactions occur through an iPhone running the Halo app, which stores local transcripts and summaries, while the actual processing happens in the cloud using models from Google, Perplexity, and others. This, the developers argue, ensures a balance between speed, efficiency, and contextual reasoning.
The display, mounted on the temple, shows roughly four lines of text at forty characters each — sufficient, in the designers’ view, for brief, unobtrusive prompts. Simple requests, such as a weather forecast, are processed within fractions of a second, while more complex queries take a few seconds longer. Crucially, Halo X requires no wake word — it is always listening. Absolutely always.
The developers claim the glasses disregard external voices, focusing solely on the wearer. Yet the very fact that the device records audio around the clock has understandably provoked concerns, especially in regions where recording requires the consent of all participants, such as California. Nguyen argues that responsibility for respecting privacy lies with users, much like with dictaphones or Zoom calls.
At present, Halo X exists only as test units built on third-party hardware, distributed among a few dozen beta testers in Silicon Valley. Commercial availability is slated for next year, though pre-orders are already open at $249.
Users can expect end-to-end encryption — from the moment audio is captured through its storage and transmission. On the prototypes, this feature is not yet enabled, but the team promises hardware-level protection and is working toward SOC 2 compliance.
For now, Halo X primarily appeals to professionals already accustomed to digital note-taking software. The device enhances such tools by offering constant presence with minimal intrusion. Yet the ultimate ambition, as the creators reveal, is not merely a digital assistant, but an invisible “second brain” — operating with the subtlety of intuition.
Even so, the ethical dilemma remains unresolved. Glasses that record every conversation and determine what is important and what is not are bound to spark debate. The developers promise flexible customization of AI behavior, and in the future may even allow manual adjustment of the “master prompt” for finely tuned responses. But in its current incarnation, Halo X is a tool that knows more about its owner than the owner knows themselves — and silence is not part of its design.
