The Vergecast - Why Big Tech can't quit smart glasses

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

A huge portion of the tech industry has decided that smart glasses are the next big thing. But why? Smart glasses are incredibly hard to make, hugely socially complicated, and require users to want to wear a gadget on their face. The Verge's Victoria Song helps us figure out which features, if any, will make smart glasses worth all the trouble. Further reading: All these smart glasses and nothing to do Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Nosedpads. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show we're going to talk about smart glasses. Specifically, why smart glasses are such a pervasive idea in the tech industry right now. We've talked a lot about them. We've been covering smart glasses since the days of Google Glass, and there are so many problems and challenges with smart glasses. There was the whole glass hole problem. There are huge technological problems with actually making this stuff real. there are supply chain issues, there are display things no one has invented yet.

Smart glasses are going to be very hard to do correctly, and even if they're done correctly, it's still very much in the air whether people want them and what they want them for. And yet, all of that aside, a huge portion of the tech industry, including most of the biggest hardware manufacturers, are absolutely convinced that smart glasses are the future. So the Virges V-Song is going to come on. She has used all the smart glasses. She has reviewed all the smart glasses, and she and I are going to try to figure out why the tech industry can't quit smart classes. It's going to be great.

But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026. Meta is turning off, at least for now, a program that it created to log everything employees do on their computers. And I mean everything, including mouse clicks and keystrokes, all to use as AI training data. Turns out, a lot of the data being collected was very private and made accessible. across the entire company. Seems bad. More broadly, there's been a lot of reporting recently about a huge morale problem at meta, where everything and everyone is being pivoted toward AI, whether they like it or not. Meanwhile, obviously, privacy and regulatory issues just abound

at meta. In a lot of ways, the meta brand right now is just not great in general, which makes this next thing, frankly, very funny. Meta launched a new pair of smart glasses today, just called the META glasses. They're cheaper than the Rayban models, which might be the big reason for dropping the partnership with such an expensive brand, and they come in several new fits, including one made with Kylie Jenner.

Meta also told the Verges-Victoria Song that the company is working on better privacy systems for the glasses and on making it harder to tamper with the smart glasses in order to record without people knowing. Of course, Meta is also reportedly working on a facial recognition system for those very same smart glasses. So, you know, big grain of self. on all of that. And finally, some very important gadget news. The HP16C, an iconic old school calculator

that was once a big hit among 1980s era programmers, is back. There's only 10,000 of them. It's $130, but now it has a faster chip and it can save and load programs. Your move, clog code. You can read more about all of this at the verge.com. That is 90 seconds on the verge for Tuesday, June 23rd. Support for today's show comes from Atio, the AI CRM for modern teams. Some companies pick a CRM because they have to. Others pick one because it helps them win. That's Atio. Every signal from emails and meetings to product usage sinks into a live picture of every account from day one.

Atio's revenue agents instantly prospect and route leads and draft outreach and follow-ups in your voice. Others call it an unfair advantage. You just call it your next move. You can go to atio.com slash vergecast and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-I-O.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from service now. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways.

ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

All right, it's time to talk glasses. The Virgins V song is here. Hi, V. Hi. Who were you wearing today, V? These are the meta rayban optics style. scriber. That was a lot of words in a row. Yeah, that was a bunch of freaking words I said. So basically, a couple months ago, meta basically was like, hey, some of you guys have really bad eyesight

and prescriptions that are not handled by the original, you know, meta-rayband glasses or the rayband meta-glasses, sorry, the naming convention of these glasses is very infuriating. So they came out with this version of the glasses, which can handle really terrible prescriptions like mine and have a slightly more ergonomic design that supposedly is better for people's faces, like the hinges go outwards, there's modular nose pads. So if you feel like a really low nose bridge like mine, you can take this little guitar pick tool that's in the thing and pop them off and put a different pair of plastic nose bridges on there. And supposedly the fit is better. And that's what I've been testing. So this is very,

very exciting. Yeah, especially for my prescription. Like I got a little card and it's like we gave you the good 1.74 high index lenses. And I was like, oh, I can tell because the glasses aren't popping out on the other side like they usually are for me. So that's nice. Yeah, this is good news. So I've brought you here for a specific purpose today. We talk a lot about smart glasses on this show. I think in particular we have spent a lot of time talking about the challenges of smart glasses. and all the reasons it's going to be very hard to pull them off, all the reasons they are a total surveillance, hellscape, all of the reasons none of this might work.

I want to go all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum today. Because throughout all of this, I continue to be struck by the fact that everyone in tech has decided that this is going to work. And I think it's pretty unusual, actually, to have this many companies this aligned on a particular kind of project. Even as we look at AI, right? Like, everybody has different ideas about AI things. Everybody thinks it's going to be smart glasses.

And so what I want to do with you is I have found 10 different things a pair of smart glasses can do. I didn't prepare you for this. We're just going to do this off the top and it's going to be great. I have 10 things and you're going to give me a one to five score for each one, five being like, this is a killer app for smart glasses. This is why we're doing this. This is smart glasses.

One being like, nobody cares. This is not a long run important. But the overarching question here is basically like, why can't tech quit smart classes? Does that sound unreasonable to you? Yeah, that sounds reasonable to me. There's a lot of reasons why, but let's get into it. Okay. I have 10 features for you, and then at the end, you get to fill in any gaps that I missed.

This is in no particular order. The first one is navigation, basically like heads-up navigation through the world with directions that you can see. one to five, how important is that as a smart glasses feature? I think it's a three. Because if you're traveling and you're in some place you don't know, that's great. It's like a super great use case when I went to Italy and I had the meta, yes, the meta rayband display. I have to like buffer for a second when I'm talking about their glasses just because they changed the naming conventions.

But when I had the display glasses with me in Italy and we were trying to get our way to the Vatican Museum, it was great. I had these heads-up directions. It's not like New York City where you have a grid layout, and it's just all you need are your cross streets and you can get anywhere just fine. You don't need to really have a great sense of direction. Italy's not that. Rome is not that. There's a lot of twisty, little windy roads there. So it was actually really helpful.

And it was a great little experiment because my family, my in-laws, they had their phones out with the Google Maps and I had the glasses on. and I was just zooming. I was going fast. I was weaving my way through things. I had my heads up. I was like, oh, this is fantastic. This is great. But then I come back home to New York City and places that I know,

and I never use that feature. So it's one of those things where it's like if you travel a lot or you're just someplace you don't know very well, what a game changer to have it, especially if you're like in an older city that doesn't have logical grid shape navigation. But if you're somewhere at home, you know, where you know the streets, well, you're never turning that on, right? It's why would you do that?

So it's sort of like, to me, a great use case for when you're traveling. But, you know, these glasses are things that big tech wants you to wear every day. So it's a nice to have, not necessarily a need to have. But when you have it, super great in a pinch, especially if, you know, like in Italy, the traffic laws are suggestion. There's always someone on a on a moped just going real fast, and so you need that awareness about you. That was the timer, the navigational features. I was like, oh, yes, love this.

Super great. And they all have different ideas about how they want to do it, like when I did the Android XR demo. One thing I really liked is that when you look down, you can kind of have a map orienting you where you are. So even, you know, maybe when I am able to have an Android XR pair of glasses to test in New York City, when I get out of a subway and I'm disoriented about where in my grid I'm looking. I can look down and kind of see that automatically.

Which, by the way, is a demo we've been seeing for like a decade. The like walkout and it'll tell you what direction to turn is A, a terrific idea and be a very old idea about what smart glasses might be. And it's just like I would love to have a pair of classes that actually does that in the wild outside of a control demo just to see how much would I actually use that? because I'm always like getting out of the subway and going like, oh, my eyes are garbage. Time to use my phone's gazillion times zoom to see what the street says over there. Okay, that's the wrong direction. I just walk until I can see the street sign and then realize I've gone the wrong way and then I walk to the other street sign. Take out your phone, find the closest street sign.

Just zoom in really far. And then you'll be able to tell. So these are like things that I've done as someone with garbage eyeballs. Yeah, so three feels right to me here. like feature you will use if you buy a pair of smart glasses, probably not the reason you will buy smart glasses. Yes. In theory.

I buy that. Nice to have. Sure. Sometimes. Yeah. Okay. Thing number two, big ass monitor for your computer. This is going to be a two, but I want to caveat this here.

Honestly, two feels generous. Two feels generous. I'm going to caveat this. I'm giving it a two because there is a certain subsect of people who I've interviewed for various things who are just like, this is the number one reason for X-Arts. ever. We call these people people who bought vision pros and refused to feel bad about it. Correct. That's what those people are called. Correct. And, you know, I've, I've been in situations where I've used a pair of X-real glasses and been able to have a second monitor on a plane where,

you know, if you use a second monitor often and you're on a place where all of a sudden you're like, oh, crap, I have, I only have 13 inches of my MacBook Air to work with. How, how dare anyone expect me to work with such limited screen real estate? And, you know, there are people who have called into the hotline who have been like, I need my second monitor in a coffee shop. What do I wear? And then I tell them that the X-real glasses exist. There is a very loyal, passionate subset of people who will absolutely buy a pair of glasses for this reason and this reason alone. Hence, I give it a two. But when we talk about the general public. There are a couple on this list that I think are going to be either a one or a five and nothing in between. But like some people, they will be the reason they will be the reason they've. buy the thing and for other people, utterly irrelevant feature. And I think this goes on that list, but I think it is mostly irrelevant. Godspeed, if this is the thing that you want out of your

smart glasses, I don't think this is for most people. This is not for the, I want to say, 90% of people, but for the 10% of hyper passionate people who love XR who think this is the ultimate way to experience productivity in a coffee shop, yeah, they're going to 100% buy the first pair of smart glasses that allowed them to do this. So, and honestly, prefer that for your plane work than a Vision Pro. Just saying, like, have we seen people with Vision Pro on planes in the wild frequently? No, because it's heavy. So, yeah.

Someday I'm going to reveal my take about VR on planes and how it's a terrific idea, and your mind is just going to melt. But today is not that day of me. Thing number three, camera, just pure hands-free, on your face camera for taking pictures and video? Four. Because, again, we're going to have a subsect of people who are being like, if I see a camera on your face, I'm going to punch you.

And I will say that when I go out into the world, sometimes I take my little bangs and I go like this over the camera. So that people, not because I'm using it in that way, I try to be very mindful about when I'm using these devices, but because I just don't want people to notice that I'm not using it, but that it has the potential to be used. And I'm just using my side bang cut to slightly obscure the camera. Because one, if the camera's on, I'm going to ruin the shot anyway with bangs.

And this is actually why I've had a lot of haircuts with bangs recently because it's great for testing. Not only camera placement and how often I tilt my head in these photos. But yeah. But I will say that when I wear these at high, home, I get really great David Attenborough-level cat videos. And I love that. And there are so many people I know who, you know, their main reason for that is in the privacy of their own home, when they want to have really great candid videos of their kids, this is something they really enjoy doing.

Content creators, I have seen some, like, recipe creators use meta-rayband glasses or Rayband meta-glasses, whichever model they have, while they're doing POV shots of like recipes and doing, I have seen some of that pop up in my TikTok feed. And obviously some commenters are always disappointed in that creator for submitting to surveillance tech, whatever. But, you know, there are certain public or in the privacy of your own home where you can feel a little more comfortable with those things, where the camera as a content creation tool is very popular. And then you have accessibility communities where, like we've done Vergecast on this before, where the low vision and blind communities, for some of them,

they feel that the ability to have the real-time AI, like the be my eyes feature with these glasses, is super helpful for them to be, you know, just kind of living more independent lives where they can get help via the camera as to what they're seeing, what they're doing. So it is a very powerful tool, which is why I give it a four as the reason why a lot of people are going to buy it. But it doesn't get a five because it's going to be a reason why some people don't buy specific glasses as well. So I've heard that from people. That is fair. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I think to the extent that there is going to be a market for smart glasses without a camera, I think you're probably right that it's not. It is not like the killer app for these things. It's not the killer. Yeah. Because it is going to convince a lot of people not to buy it.

or to buy one that doesn't have a camera. So I think the solution, and I don't, you know, this is free, I'm putting this out here. I think the solution is some sort of physical shutter or a modular camera where you can stick it in and out so that when you're in a like situation where you're like, I don't want to make people feel uncomfortable, I can actually put a physical shutter

or something over the camera to just visually signify that I'm not being a creep right now. You know, like a version of my bangs. that's not so finicky or whatnot. I think that would be a really smart solution. There's probably reasons why they haven't done that, but I'm just saying that's my free idea. Beanies that you wear that have little flaps that come down.

Yeah, or like, you know, with your webcams on your computer where you just have a thing where you go, it's not on. Like, I feel like that would be a super easy thing to do to make other people feel comfortable. I don't know why we haven't done that yet. So, yeah. I agree. All right, let's keep moving. Thing number four, and you kind of mentioned this already,

and I think this is actually a quick five, and we can just move on, is accessibility stuff. And this is the sort of be my eyes stuff. It's live captioning, which comes up a lot. But the idea that basically for people who are low vision or have hearing difficulties, these are an accessibility thing. And I think you've reported on this enough to know that, like, this is very much a killer app for people, right?

Like for people who need this easy, huge victory. Yeah, huge victory. The only thing is that they need to commit to supporting it because there are people within that community who are worried that in three years they're just going to take this tool that I've come to rely on a way. But like easy five. It's very fair worry, but like, you know, easy five for me.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Next one, music and podcasts, just basically like smart glasses as headphones. Five. Really? It is. Higher than camera.

Yeah, because there's no downside really to it. I get to have my situational awareness. It is actually easily the feature I use the most. So, like, I'm in a house. It's a very vertical, narrow house, and sometimes I have to yell to my spouse or something where they're yelling to me. And if we have our ear pods in, we just can't hear each other.

So then we have to trek up three floors of things and be like, I've been yelling. You can't hear me? And it's like, oh, sorry, I got my really great noise canceling whatever's on. So when I'm doing laundry and I'm just listening to an audio or a podcast and I have these on where they're not sunglasses and doors. I just use this and I can hear things going on when I'm outside on a walk and there's my agro neighbor going 50 in a residential area and a giant range rover. I can keep my awareness and not turn into a pancake while I'm

walking about listening to my music and audiobooks. The only time is not great is if you're on the subway, yes, you are going to have to pull out your AirPods or whatever you use at that point. But I use the audio all the time for my podcast and all of that. It is like the number one uncontroversial feature that I use these for. I'm with you actually. And the meta ones in particular are like a sneakily great phone call device. Yes. They sound good. The mic is pretty good. My only caveat is that I often have to do this when I'm on calls because of my low nose bridge. You go full librarian. I go full librarian because the way my nose is shaped and I even have the low nose bridge modular things that I put on here, I still, on some phone calls, I've been told I sound muffled. And I'm like,

hold on. Let me just, how do I sound now? And they're like, you sound great. So that is my one, my one feedback. But for most people who don't have a very low profile nose, you probably won't ever have that issue. So yeah. Okay. So that's a, that's a five for headphones. That actually makes me happy because I'm with you in that that is my single most used feature. But I kind of That was just me. So that makes me happy. And actually, unrelated to this one,

the next one on my list is communication, like calls, video calls is a thing that has been demoed since like Google Glass, but basically just any sort of communication tool, phone, video, whatever you want on smart glasses, one to five. Three,

just because I don't think they have tweaked what the best use of for it is. because I have the non-display version on right now. I get a text on my phone. It's like, someone has texted you. And then I either have to like out loud say that or pull out my phone. So it's not really a replacement. The spoken communication stuff is awful that way.

It's not great about being in public. So the vast majority of what people will probably buy at this point is the model that I'm wearing, which is just mostly audio. So when it's a mostly audio experience, it's not that different from a smartwatch. and a smartwatch can be a little more discreet and easy to interact with, in my opinion. But when we get to the display glasses at a price that's affordable to people, I do think being able to see a calendar notification, being able to see who texts you and what very quickly, very discreetly,

is going to be much more of a reason. We're just not fully there yet that people can have. And I also am very mindful of once you put the display in, you just inevitably are always looking off to the side every so often. And people just start feeling a little disrespected when you do that a little too often. So I'm not sure how that will play out in the long term, which is why I say three, because I think it could be a very good use case, but not sure how people will feel long term. Are you at all compelled by the idea of the like first person video call that you can see what I see as we're on a FaceTime or whatever together? That's like a sometimes thing for me. I don't think that's going to be.

I think that makes way more sense in an enterprise or a workspace. So it's sort of like, hey, I'm trying to fix this thing. I don't know how to do this. Call my father-in-law being like, I don't know how to fix my toilet. Yes, that's going to be great. That's awesome. This, by the way, killer app for smart glasses in general is like, in general.

See instructions next to you as you do stuff, remote support, like all this stuff. There's a reason smart glasses have found genuine, like, honest to God, product market fit in, like, factories. Like that's a real good thing. And I think you're probably right that this works there better than anywhere right now. Yeah. It's going to be like the heads up directions where when you need it, ah, great. I have a use case for it. I am sure many husbands will be using it when their wives are like, I asked you to get

Hollandeau sauce. I can't find it in the grocery store. And then the wife is just like, I'm just going to give you directions. Turn left here. Go there. Yes, I think that'll be a use case. But it'll also be a sometimes thing. not going to buy it just so you can do that, but when you need it, it'll be cool. That sort of thing.

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what I would just call headphone mode, and communication. The next one on my list is kind of next to communication, which is notifications and reminders. And this becomes, I think, another question of what matters in audio versus what matters when there's a display in front of you. But again, in terms of why big tech can't quit this idea, you do see pop-up notifications in the corner of your vision in every single one of these demos and concept videos. But for people who might someday buy these,

is that a killer app? One to five. What do you think? That's a four. And the funny thing is that I just got a notification through these glasses saying that my best friend had texted me. That's good. That's good.

That is cool. But the reason why I don't give it a full five, because I do think there are a lot of people who would love a discreet way to be like, oh, I got notified while I'm heads down and doing stuff is that we haven't found the tweak yet of how to filter these notifications in a way that's truly useful. Because I know for a fact that my best friend probably just texted me some TikTok video of something and that that can wait. And that, you know, it kind of distracted me from this thing that I need my full focus on right now, which is doing it. a great verge cast. So in some ways, yes, great. Love it. It's going to be super helpful when I can see, oh, crap, I have a meeting coming up soon. I got to go and do all that sort of stuff. I think that'll be great for a lot of people. But the notification deluge is why we don't want to look at our phones anymore, too. And you can't not see it in front of your eye or in your ears.

So I think for some people, in some cases, it is a very powerful use case, but what they haven't figured out is how to have intelligent notifications. So once that you really, it's just everything at the moment and you don't always need everything coming through on your glasses. You just don't. You don't want that. It's going to make you super tired of it long term. So I think they need to do a little more tweaking and fine tuning and giving you more control over all the different types of smart glasses for it. to be a super killer use case, which is why it's only getting a four. Yeah, I think you're right. I remember I had a conversation with a very senior Google executive like 10 or 11 years ago now. And what he told me is that the single hardest problem for all of this is, A, understanding as the product maker that most of the time your job is to not be visible at all. That, in fact, your AR glasses should be nowhere most of the time.

and that B, figuring out the, when you've hit the level of actually putting yourself in somebody's face is so different than the level of buzzing somebody's phone in their pocket that it is going to take a long time to figure out. And boy, are we not anywhere close to anybody actually solving that problem. Nowhere near. But I think you're right that like done correctly, that becomes a killer app for this thing.

But that done correctly is a big, giant ask. They pitch these as AI glasses. and what I want the AI in these glasses to actually do is know when I'm in a meeting and when to silence notifications and then maybe surface the notification that it reads as urgent or not urgent, so it can decide for me when I'm in a thing whether I actually need to know it at what moment. And like that, they can't do that. They can just push it. All they do is they push it.

So, you know, we're not at the point where it makes, where it's killer. It's just another phone on your face kind of situation. Agreed. Okay, I'm glad you brought up AI because I have three AI ones for you in a row. Oh, let's go. AI thing number one, translation. Another one that comes up in all of these demos, the idea of like you and I are talking and I can either see or hear you speaking in another language in my language in real time. Two. It's a better, in theory, idea than it is in practice for me thus far.

Because one, how often are you in a situation that you need things translated? There's going to be some people who travel a lot, love that. There's going to be people in multilingual families, in which case, how good are you at doing pigeon? Because my family speaks Conglish, and they do things to these language that are very creative, and I think has thus far really tripped up these AI translators that I've tested. And then there's just like the whole issue of, again, I was in Italy. I put these translating things on. And when you have everyone in Italian yelling around you mixed with English, it doesn't know who to translate when.

That is a thing that's really tough. So right now these live AI translations with these glasses and other devices, they're great for when you're in a quiet place one-on-one with someone. Again, I was on a – I wrote about an optimizer. I was on a train with this really cute Chinese grandma, and she only trusted me. but like I don't know why. Well, I know why I look at my face. But she went up to me and she's like, I'm so afraid I'm not going to get off the thing. And we were using these AI translators.

And that was a really wonderful experience because she was so scared and I was able to help her, even though I'm not the right kind of East Asian for her in that particular experience. So I think once in a while it'll be great, but it won't work quite as well as you want. And there's a lot of technical challenges. So two right now. I think I agree. It's a better, it's a terrific demo. more than it is like a really sort of everyday mainstream product.

And it probably will be that way for a while. Everyday life is very loud. We do horrible things to language that the AI has a hard time keeping up with. So we'll have to see. And actually, in a weird way, the behavior of like holding my phone up to my mouth while I talk and then holding my phone up to your mouth while you talk is actually kind of solves a bunch of those problems in a way that like ambiently listening with my smart glasses doesn't. Yeah. It feels awkward, but it like weirdly kind of works.

Every time I've tried that, it has worked better than I expected. It works because we understand, oh, I have to talk slower. Right. We know what we're doing here. Oh, I have to be more patient. Totally. Where if they don't know and it's just happening and it's a one-way translation where you understand what they're saying, you're Chewbaccaing the experience. Yes.

Yeah. Chubbacca is a verb is a new one. I really, I liked it very much. That's my life. All right. AI thing number two, facial recognition, aka Nelai Patel's ideal dystopian hellscape. The thing where you're walking. along and it pops up a thing over their head that says, this is the person you met two weeks ago.

This is a one. This is like a, this is like a. Do not want get this out of my face? I think the vast majority of people do not want get this out of my face. The only time that people actually want this is like when you are at a mixer or a meeting and you want to be saved, the point two seconds of embarrassment when you're like, oh, shoot, this person knows me and I don't know them. but honestly, that's easily solved by being a human and saying, hi. Can I tell you my theory about this feature? Yes.

I think this feature should only exist 30 minutes at a time, maybe not even, maybe like 10 minutes at a time, and it should cost $500. And it should be, this should be like some charity should create this and it should give the money to a good cause and you should be able to very briefly turn it on to solve this one specific problem that you're talking about. and it should be prohibitively expensive. But if you're like, I am not going to get this job if I don't remember this person's name, it's worth it to me to turn this on for three minutes and I'm going to do it, I'll allow it.

This is like an ambient thing I think is just a complete societal nightmare. But like, let's monetize this in insane ways. I'm all for it. I'm going to like kind of riff on what your version is and I think geo-fencing. So like if you could geo-fence this feature to like a conference hall or let's say, you're working with dementia patients who can't remember people. And I think that's one use case that people sometimes, quote, facial recognition in these glasses for. Like, let's say you're a dementia patient.

You need to remember who people in your family are. You can geo-fence your house for a certain amount of people in program who it's supposed to recognize. If you have heavy guardrails for specific places and or specific, like in a hospital, Maybe you're okay in a certain treatment ward for dementia patients and you can geo-fence the feature so that it only works within that specific place. I think maybe you could make an argument for it. I also like the idea of it being like a two-way buddy list situation where like you sign up to remember me with your glasses and I sign up to be remembered by your glasses. That becomes like a more give-and-take situation that works. So, like, yeah, at a teeny tiny sort of one person to person scale, there is something here as a like overall feature of these devices.

I'm with you, one out of five. Can we give a zero? Like a zero out of five? Because I just know that like I've had people in my DMs just screaming that this is not something they want. And totally, I feel like it's obvious why. Nor should they. It is, it is Nilai Patel's most monstrous take. It's my humble opinion.

All right, next one, last AI one is just sort of overall AI interactions. Everybody wants you to use these things to talk to chat GPT, talk to meta AI as like the sort of ambient companionship of an AI bot. One to five. What do you think? It's a two. There's always going to be someone who really argues or comes up with a really creative way. So I'm giving an allowance for someone who finds a way that I'm not thinking of in this moment that is creative, that is useful and that is helpful. But by and large, I fundamentally disagree that AI is the killer use case for these things,

just because when I've used it outside of very heavily guardrailed demos, freaking useless. I've taken these glasses and looked at a pile of books and been like, hey, these are my books. I'm trying to figure out what to read. What do you recommend? And they go, I don't have an opinion. Well, thank you. Like, that is an actual demo, like actual thing that I've tried with these glasses. or it was like, I don't have an opinion.

You should just read what interests you. Well, thank you. I bought the book because it interests me. I'm asking for a recommendation. I will say we had friends over a couple of weeks ago, and one of them went to the wine store, pointed his phone at the shelf of wine and said, which one of these should I buy to go with?

I think we were having pizza. And it recommended him like a pretty good bottle of wine. And he came and he was so proud of himself for having used AI to successfully solve this problem. And it was good wine. And I was like, A, like, genuinely neat AI feature. B, perfectly fine on your phone. Like, we've solved no new problems by offloading this to smart classes.

Or it's just like, one of the suggested demos that I've done in the past is like, open your fridge and ask it to suggest a good recipe for you. I opened my fridge, wilting vegetables on the left, sad other things on the right. And it was just like, you could make scrambled eggs. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yes. scrambled eggs, that's what's I'm going to sure.

You know, so I think... The correct answer there is like, V, get your life together. Love meta-AI. Yeah. Or, you know, my spouse is a super car person. I get dragged to car events.

A lot of the testing I did with these for identification of objects was going up to cars and going, what am I looking at? What model of car is this? Giant Ferrari logo, right? I'm like, even I know a Ferrari logo at this point. And it's just like, oh, that's a sports car. Can't tell you which sports

card it is. Not very great at logo recognition. And at that point, I'm like, I don't see the point. Yeah, I'm eager to see the ways in which that stuff gets better with camera stuff in particular. But right now, that as like an ambient thing just doesn't really seem to work. Unless you're a museum and you've programmed these glasses and instead of like those crappy little, audio tour things where you have to punch things in. You give them a pair of glasses. They look at a thing and it pops up what the thing is. I tried doing that in Italy, but again, the Pope did not have holy Wi-Fi at the Vatican Museum. It worked for one Belvedere torso and the rest it was like, here is a Renaissance butt that you can look at. So. Pope Leo, if you're listening and I know that

you are, fix this for V for next time. All right. I have one more for you. And I saved this for last for you in particular because it's fitness tracking. This is like a sort of niche thing right now. But I will say still, to this day, the nicest thing you have said about a pair of smart glasses was about the Oakley, where they called the vanguards, which are fundamentally fitness-based smart glasses. So fitness tracking as a killer app for smart glasses,

one to five. What do you think? Three, because it depends on the implementation. I think if you are... Let's assume if it's good, are we looking at like four, or five? Like, does this become a reason people, a lot of people buy smart glasses? I think it's a reason why people might buy sports smart glasses. Just very, like, specific use case sports smart glasses where you can swap the, which is an idea that the vanguard's have,

where you swap the lenses for the sport that you're doing. And then you can get like cues, like, oh, you've done a mile. Here's your cue. Or, oh, your heart rate training, your heart rate's too high. Here's a visual cue in here, like, slow it down. Like, for those elite, Or like very intense athletes, I think that could be really useful, especially if you give heads-up navigational directions where they can be like, oh, I know where I'm going or I know where I'm running. Here's my route. That I think becomes a very useful and powerful training tool. But for the average person who's just like, I'm going to run my local 5K. You don't need that. You're good. These are for the people who like to email me saying actually garments are better than the Apple Watch. Like if that's you, this is for you. If that's you, if that's you, I actually think you're really going to. enjoy the Oakley vanguard. Like, I really enjoy them when I'm just training, and I

could imagine them being, you know, runners, they're always doing the vlogs, they're like, mile one, mile two, mile three. Like, if that's you, I think you're going to have a good time with these Oakley meta vanguard and having time lapses that you can share

on Strava, like, that's, you're going to love them. They're expensive, but you're going to love them. But it's a specific use case, and it makes sense, and it's a tool that is very clear. It's like a, I don't know, there's an idea I just had. What if we had smart glasses

that are made for specific use cases that people are like, oh, that totally makes sense. Like content creation glasses that you use for that specific purpose or exercise glasses for that specific purpose. Well, that's what I was just going to say

because I think everybody wants smart glasses to be like the smartphone in that it is sort of the one device you have for everything. And the advantage that the vanguard and things like them will have is that it is a specific thing for which people buy

specific gear. And there's no, nobody feels bad taking off their running sunglasses at the end of a run, right? Like it is, you bought it for that purpose, you use it for that purpose, and then you take it off. And that is such a lower bar for success than like, put your prescription in, use them all day every day for the rest of your life. And worry about battery life all day for the rest of your life. You wear those, those metal glasses, the Oakley ones. I become Lady Gibroni. It's a different persona. And everyone looking at me is just like, oh, she's just doing that. thing. Good for her. But yeah, it's... Lady Gibroni parentheses, complimentary. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I look, I look like a certain type of person when I put those on. And that's fine. It's great. Yeah. That's what you're doing. That's, that's, lady gibrony is a vibe. All right. So it seems like we're at the point now where we've gone through this whole list and the most basic use cases, basically headphone mode, camera, simple sort of notification stuff, fitness tracking. Like there's a handful of things that have potential to get there.

But right now it is still the simple stuff that is the best reason people might go buy a pair of smart glasses. 100% nothing. All of the big ambitious stuff about this kind of replacing your phone, I'm not sold on it yet. I don't think they've found it's a bunch of little things that are nice to have when you have them. but as an overarching, one, big thesis, one, I don't believe AI is it. And two, we're not there. I don't know if we'll ever get there. There's a very possible chance that meta will ruin it for everyone by being meta

before we ever get there. But, you know, with niche tech, it has to fit into your life. And the things that actually fit into your life naturally and organically are the listen to your podcast, the taking a picture of your cat or your kid and the easy stuff. That's the stuff that people like. And that's the reason why the most basic versions are the ones that sell and not the ones that are who'sy-whutsy. Everything is floating in my vision. So, yeah.

All right. That's my list. It was actually 11 things, V. I'm sorry. Translation was originally a sub thing of communication. But once we started talking about AI, I just made it at something. So those are 11 things. If you think there are killer apps that we missed, if you think there are other cool things

that people are going to want to do with smart glasses, hit us up, call the hotline 866, Verge1611, send us email, vergecats to the bird.com, yell at Vee on social media. We love hearing from you. Don't yell at V on social media. Don't yell at me. Politely give me your comments, and I will respond in good faith. There we go. We love to hear it. V, thank you for being here. Appreciate it. All right. That's it for the show. Thank you to V for being here, and thank you, as always for listening. Like I said, if you have thoughts about smart glasses, if you have things that make you absolutely not want smart glasses if you think you have things that you will buy them for

that we didn't talk about. We want to hear from you. The hotline is 866 version 1-1. The email is Vergecast at the verge.com. Send us anything and everything all the time. We truly, truly love hearing from you. And as always, the best thing you can do to support everything that we're up to here

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