Google to Partner With Eyewear Brands on AI-Equipped Smart Glasses

Google said Tuesday (May 20) that it expects smart glasses equipped with its extended reality (XR) operating system, Android XR, and its artificial intelligence (AI) model, Gemini, to become a convenient and always present AI assistant.

The firm said this in a Tuesday blog post announcing that it has partnered with eyewear brands Gentle Monster and Warby Parker to create Android XR-equipped glasses that are stylish and comfortable enough to wear all day. In the future, it will add other partners.

“What if your AI assistant could see the world from your perspective and offer hands-free help? That’s the vision driving our latest advancements in Android XR,” Shahram Izadi, vice president and general manager, Android XR at Google, wrote in the post. “It’s the first Android platform built in the Gemini era, and it powers an ecosystem of headsets, glasses and everything in between.”

The addition of Gemini to glasses will make a “giant leap forward” in the smart glasses Google has been working on for the past decade, Izadi wrote.

These glasses will be equipped with a camera, microphone and speakers and will work with the user’s phone to enable access to apps without having to hold the phone, according to the post.

With these tools and capabilities, Android XR-equipped smart glasses will privately provide information to the user when needed through an optional in-lens display; understand the user’s context by joining AI with tools that see and hear; provide live language translation; and help with tasks like messaging friends, making appointments, asking for directions and taking photos, per the post.

To create these smart glasses, Google has extended its existing partnership with Samsung to include glasses as well as headsets, according to the post.

“Together, we’re creating a software and reference hardware platform that will enable the ecosystem to make great glasses,” Izadi wrote. “Developers will be able to start building for this platform later this year.”

Google introduced Android XR in December, saying that it developed the operating system in collaboration with Samsung and that Android XR will first launch on headsets built by Samsung.

AI is driving a new wave of next-generation smart glasses, PYMNTS reported in February. Beyond Google and Samsung, Meta, Amazon, Snap, Baidu and Xiaomi are betting on smart glasses to be the next popular connected wearable.