AI Assistants Belong in Your Ears, Not on Your Face

The tech industry has spent the past few years trying to convince us that the future of AI lives behind a pair of lenses. Meta is betting billions on it so far , Google is rolling out Android XR , Samsung is getting in on the glasses trend , and Snap is still trying to make Spectacles catch on .

The pitch is always some version of the same fantasy: you’re in a foreign country where you don’t understand the language. You look at a menu, and a translation appears right in your field of view. Look at a dress someone is wearing on the street, and AI whispers in your ear the name of the dress and its designer. You’re at a party and you’re terrible with names, but not to worry, your AI-enabled glasses can display the names of everyone there so you don’t have any awkward social interactions.

It sounds like a great idea, but in practice, it’s become a disaster for the obvious reason: people don’t like being recorded without their consent.

Determined to salvage their hardware investments, companies say “let’s just put AI on it,” Maruchi Kim, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Washington who worked on Google’s XR team until earlier this year, tells Gizmodo, “but it still carries so much stigma because it started off as this video capture device.”

This, ultimately, is the unsolvable problem for AI glasses , no matter how capable their AI components are in practice: glasses were never designed for conversational AI; they were designed for first-person video capture and augmented reality. AI got bolted onto them because they were products these companies already had that weren’t selling in the kind of numbers they needed.

Meanwhile, the wearable best suited to actually carry a conversational AI assistant everywhere has been sitting in your ears for a decade, quietly proving itself in a way that glasses have yet to do.

Smart glasses exist because of two capabilities: they can record first-person video, and they can overlay information into your field of view. “I think these are both things that people didn’t really ask for,” Kim says.

Video capture from a face-mounted camera has always been a feature that no one really knows what to do with, and the problems have only gotten worse from the halcyon days of 2013 when “ glassholes ” were being socially ostracized. Now, the cameras are better, video data transmission is much faster, and unlike the distinctive, Borg-like profile of Google Glass , smart glasses put cameras into regular-looking glasses like Ray-Bans.

Add in an increasingly toxic internet culture (another Meta innovation, incidentally), and we get to 2026’s “pervert glasses.” There’s no shortage of instances of men wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses harassing women on the street or adolescent boys in school filming their bullying , mostly of young girls. The problem is bad enough that universities are warning students about the problem .