Why Big Tech can't quit smart glasses

21:45Victoria Song: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 that's a real good thing.

22:20And I think you're probably right that this works there better than anywhere right now.

22:23Victoria Song:Yeah, it's going to be it's going to be like the heads up directions where when you need it. Ah, great. I have 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 hollandaise 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. You're not going to buy it just so you can do that. But when you need it, it'll be cool. That sort of thing. Okay. I buy it.

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25:07Nilay Patel:That's evenrealities.com, promo code VERGE.

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25:50Nilay Patel:We've all been there. You pop into the shop for five minutes and all of a sudden you've forgotten where you parked. Car? Car? Unfortunately, that lost feeling is what it's like trying to manage your policy with other insurers. Here, car. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Please. With Geico, you can use the app to easily manage all your policies in one place. Did this parking lot have a waterfall? I think you've wandered too far, mate. It feels good to find what you're looking for. It feels good to Geico. Okay, so so far we've talked through navigation, big-ass monitor, camera, accessibility, what I would just call headphone mode, and communication.

26:33The 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 like 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 is that a killer app? One to five. What do you think?

27:03Victoria Song: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 a great Verge cast.

27:46Victoria Song:So in some ways, yes, great. Love it. 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 ones that you really, it's just everything at the moment. And you don't always need everything coming through on your glasses.

28:23Victoria Song:You just don't. You don't want that. It's going to make you super tired of it long term. So I think I 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 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.

28:58That, in fact, your AR glasses should be nowhere most of the time. and that B, figuring out 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.

29:20Victoria Song: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.

29:56Victoria Song: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. 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 pidgin?

30:38Victoria Song:Because my family speaks Conglish and they do things to these languages 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.

31:21Victoria Song: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, 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, 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.

31:50Victoria Song: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's like ambiently listening with my smart glasses doesn't. It feels awkward, but it like weirdly kind of works.

32:25Every time I've tried that, it has worked better than I expected.

32:28Victoria Song:It works because we understand, oh, I have to talk slower. Oh, I have to be more patient. 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 Chewbacca-ing the experience. Yes. Yeah. Chewbacca as a verb is a new one. I really, I liked that very much. It's my life. All right. AI thing number two, facial recognition, aka Nilay 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.

33:05Victoria Song: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 0.2 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.

33:47And 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.

34:11Victoria Song:I'm going to like kind of riff on what your version is. And I think geofencing. So like, if you could geofence 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 geofence your house for a certain amount of people and 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 geofence the feature so that it only works within that specific place, I think maybe you could make an argument for it.

35:02I also like the idea of it being like a like a two way buddy list situation where like, yeah, 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.

35:27Victoria Song: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 Nilay 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 ChatGPT, 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.

36:04Victoria Song:So I'm giving a like 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. So like that is an actual demo, like actual thing that I've tried with these glasses where it was like, I don't have an opinion.

36:44Victoria Song: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 the 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're 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.

37:19Like we've solved no new problems by offloading this to smart glasses.

37:23Victoria Song: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 on the shore. 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?

38:05Victoria Song: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 car 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.

38:48Victoria Song: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 of it was like, here is a Renaissance butt that you can look at. Pope Leo, if you're listening, and I know that you are, fix this for V for next time. Yeah. 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, what are they called the Vanguards, which are fundamentally fitness-based smart glasses.

39:28So fitness tracking as a killer app for smart glasses, one to five. What do you think?

39:34Victoria Song: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 vanguards 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.

40:29Victoria Song:You don't need that. Don't. You're good. These are for the people who like to email me saying, actually, Garmin's are better than the Apple Watch. Like, if that's you, this is for you. If that's you, I actually think you're really going to enjoy the Oakley Vanguard. It's like I really enjoy them when I'm just training and I could imagine them being, you know, runners there. 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 MetaVangards and having time lapses that you can share on Strava. Like that's, you're going to love them.

41:06Victoria Song: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.

41:34And the advantage that the vanguards 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.

41:57Victoria Song:And worry about battery life all day for the rest of your life. You wear those those those metaglass, the Oakley ones. I become Lady Jabroni. It's a different persona. And everyone looking at me is just like, oh, she's just doing that thing. Yeah. Good for her. But yeah, it's Lady Jabroni parentheses complimentary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 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. Lady Jabroni 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.

42:47But right now it is still the simple stuff that is the best reason people might go buy a pair of smart glasses.

42:54Victoria Song: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 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 very it's a very possible chance that meta will ruin it for everyone by being meta uh 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 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 what'sy 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 its own thing 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-VERGE-11 send us email vergecasttheverge.com yell at v on social media we love hearing from you don't 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 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 the email is vergecast at the verge.com send us anything and everything all the time.

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45:11This show is Produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Locasio. We will see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.

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