Halo has opened preorders for Halo X, a pair of smart glasses designed to capture conversations continuously and surface AI responses and summaries directly in a heads-up display. The founders, Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen, say the system aims to make wearers “super intelligent” by listening 24/7 and offering unsolicited help. According to The Register, the duo previously drew attention for software that processed Meta Ray-Ban video to build in-depth dossiers.
What the Halo X glasses do
The camera-free frames include embedded microphones and a display showing roughly four lines of text at about 40 characters per line. Audio is sent over Bluetooth Low Energy to a paired iPhone running the Halo app, which transcribes and routes requests to Halo’s cloud. Ardayfio said the company mixes models from providers, including Google and Perplexity, to balance “speed, cost, and contextual reasoning.”
Nguyen described instant factual recall—such as top GDPs or historic dates—alongside retrieval of past conversations. Users can ask for summaries like, “Tell me what my wife and I decided about our daughter’s college tuition on Saturday,” and receive a generated recap on the display. The glasses don’t require a wake word; the AI continuously evaluates whether speech merits a response. Ardayfio noted background talk is typically ignored, and a nod upward opens a dashboard for time and calendar, while other controls live in the phone app.
Privacy, performance, and early testing
‘Always listening’ meets encryption plans
Nguyen and Ardayfio acknowledge that constant recording is a major concern. They told The Register the software will offer end-to-end encryption so “no one can read your conversations except you.” Ardayfio said encryption is planned at capture, at rest, and in transit, with Halo also working toward SOC 2 compliance. The AI agent can be disabled in the iOS app, though Ardayfio said Android support is unlikely “for a long time.”
Roughly 20 testers in Silicon Valley are using beta units on third-party hardware. Internet queries can take up to two seconds, while simpler answers, like weather, may return in a few hundred milliseconds. The glasses function mainly as a display for the cloud system, and the team is training intervention timing with human feedback. Early feedback has been “promising,” Nguyen said, while noting more work is needed to refine when and how the assistant steps in. One possibility under consideration is letting users edit the master prompt to constrain responses.
Preorders are open at $249, with shipments expected early next year, The Register reported.
