Imagine stepping into a world where your glasses don’t just help you see — they help you remember everything. That’s the bold vision behind Halo X, a new pair of AI-powered smart glasses created by two Harvard dropouts, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio. These aren’t your regular frames — they’re essentially “wearable brains” that listen, transcribe, and serve you real-time information on demand.
“The goal is simple,” Nguyen explains. “We want to make you super intelligent the moment you put them on.”
Ardayfio puts it another way: “Think of it as giving you infinite memory.”
So, how does it work? Halo X continuously listens to conversations, records and transcribes them, and then displays relevant information right on your lenses. Whether someone throws a complex math question your way or drops a corporate jargon bomb in a meeting, Halo X is there to whisper the right answer — instantly.
And they’re already making noise in Silicon Valley. With $1 million in seed funding led by Pillar VC (and backed by the likes of Soma Capital and Village Global), the glasses — priced at $249 — open for preorder this week. According to Ardayfio, “This is the first real step toward what we call vibe thinking.”
But, of course, with great innovation comes… well, great controversy.
Halo X isn’t shy about what it does — but privacy experts are raising their eyebrows. Unlike Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, which flash a tiny light to show they’re recording, Halo X is completely discreet. No indicators. No notifications. Nothing to warn the people around you that every word they say could be saved (even if temporarily).
This has raised serious concerns. “Normalizing the use of an always-on recording device chips away at the expectation of privacy in everyday conversations,” says Eva Galperin, Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In some U.S. states, it’s even illegal to record without consent—something the founders acknowledge but say is the “user’s responsibility.”
The startup claims to prioritize security — promising end-to-end encryption, SOC 2 compliance, and outsourced transcription through Soniox, which allegedly doesn’t store recordings. Still, they’ve shared no technical proof of these protections.
It’s not the first time the duo has waded into controversial waters. Back at Harvard, they built I-XRAY, a demo that added facial recognition to Meta’s smart glasses. In one test, they reportedly pulled up strangers’ personal details within seconds—without permission.
For now, Halo X doesn’t have a camera — just a mic, a display, and AI brains powered by Google’s Gemini for reasoning and Perplexity for live internet lookups. But they’ve hinted that future versions might integrate cameras, raising even more questions.
So, are Halo X glasses the next big thing or a privacy nightmare in disguise? Either way, one thing’s certain: the line between human intelligence and machine assistance just got a whole lot blurrier.
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