Thanks to my friends from the WAEA smartglasses association in Shenzhen, I have been able to try the new Huawei AI glasses at the Huawei store. I came out with pretty positive impressions, but not about everything…
Huawei AI Glasses
Huawei, one of the leading Chinese phone manufacturers, has recently launched its first AI glasses. These are smartglasses similar to Ray-Ban Meta, featuring a camera, speaker, and no displays. They are connected with the whole Huawei ecosystem and support the XiaoYi AI assistant. They work by being connected to a Huawei phone.
They are currently sold only in China, and considering the ban on Huawei in the West, I’m a bit skeptical they will ever reach our countries. But I was very happy to try them anyway, because Huawei is a very important company in Asia, and it’s always interesting to learn what it’s up to.
I’ve been able to go hands-on with the glasses in a dedicated session in a Huawei store for like 20-30 minutes. This time was not enough for a comprehensive review, but it was enough to give you some first impressions about the device.
Design
Huawei AI glasses come in 3 different designs. I tried the one with just half of the frame around the lenses. The glasses felt slick but pretty solid. You can see some pictures of them below.
The glasses looked “ok” on the design side. They have not been made in collaboration with an eyewear company, so they are not very fashionable. They are not bad, but they have still a bit of that “techie look” that does not make them cool to wear. And if I have to be very honest with you, they don’t suit my face. But when my friend Timothy Tu (founder at Mind Over Mandarin) had them on his face, he looked fine with it, so maybe they have been designed to fit Asian faces more than Western ones.
Comfort
I haven’t worn the glasses for long enough to judge their comfort, but in my short demo time, I don’t remember any discomfort while wearing them. This is also because the glasses are very lightweight: the frames are just around 35g, which, adding the weight of the lenses, may result in a total weight around 47g. A compound weight between 40 and 50g may be acceptable for all-day usage, and this is a big pro of these glasses. The compromise Huawei had to do to obtain this was to remove the screen, so the glasses are audio-only.
Audio
I didn’t have the opportunity to make phone calls with the glasses, but I have been provided with some Chinese songs to play through them, and I can say the audio was loud and clear.
There are also various microphones installed on the glasses, and considering that the AI was understanding well what I was saying, I would say they work. But a more accurate test with a phone call would be needed to certify that there are no problems (e.g., with plosive letters)
Huawei advertises on its website that its glasses also have an audio privacy feature, which prevents the audio from leaking too much outside. I have not made extensive tests on this, but I’ve found it interesting that the videos I recorded by putting my phone close to the glasses to record the music played by them just recorded a quite low-volume audio. This means that somehow this feature works. The glasses should also allow you to speak with low volume to the AI, and they should still get what you are saying. I didn’t get to test this feature, though. It’s interesting that Huawei is putting so much effort around conversational privacy on this device.
Interactions
You interact with the glasses using the right leg of the frame. You can:
- Long-tap: to refuse a call
- Double-tap: play-pause (for music); pick-hang call (for calls)
- Swipe left/right: adjust the volume
There are also two top buttons on the legs of the frame:
- Left-button: start conversation with AI
- Right-button (short press): shoot photo
- Right-button (long press): shoot video
These are pretty standard interaction mechanics for AI glasses like this one. The only thing that I found a bit special is that there is a dedicated button to start an AI session on the fly.
Photos and videos
These glasses feature a 12MP camera. It can shoot photos up to 4096 Ă— 3072 pixels and videos up to 1920 Ă— 1440 pixels (at 30 fps). Huawei advertises a lot of features for picture improvement, like the fact that the glasses can compensate for tilting in the picture. For videos, they also have stabilization. You can also preview the photos you take on a Huawei smartwatch, if you have one.
I didn’t try any of these special features. I just took a few photos and videos, and the quality seemed good to me. The only special feature that I tried is that you can set for photos and videos to be downloaded automatically from the glasses. You know, when using any smartglasses, you take a picture, the picture is saved to the device memory, and then using the companion app, you can download it onto your phone. With the Huawei Glasses, you can set this download operation to be automatic, so it is much more comfortable: you shoot a picture, and it automatically gets to your phone. It is pretty handy.
Battery
Huawei advertises 12h of mixed use, which goes down to 9 hours for continuous music listening and 8 hours for calls. This is quite a lot, much more than many competitors on the market. Of course, I did not have enough time to test this.
AI Assistant
Pressing the left button on the glasses, you can start a conversation with XiaoYi, Huawei’s AI assistant. After the session starts, you don’t need to continuously invoke “XiaoYi”, but you can just speak naturally. Unluckily, XiaoYi only speaks in Chinese, so I couldn’t have very profound conversations. But I was able to ask a few questions, and it answered correctly, so it seems to work in a pretty good way. The fun thing about the language is that it can also understand questions in English, but then it only answers in Chinese.
When you have the AI session open on your phone, you can have a live stream of what you are looking at with your glasses, and a full transcription of the dialogue between you and the AI. This is also a very good accessibility feature.
Companion app
Like all this type of AI glasses, Huawei AI Glasses also have a companion app. With the companion app, you can do the usual things, like pair the phone to the glasses, change some settings, and launch the applications on the glasses (e.g. music playback, translation, etc…). For some things, you can use the app instead of the buttons and the swipe area on the glasses.
The design of the app is very similar to that of all other Chinese glasses, so I don’t have much to say about it. It works, but it is not very original.
Live Translation
The glasses can perform live translation and translate what the other person says in your own language. Various languages are supported: I tried Chinese with English, and when the WAEA people were speaking with me in Chinese, I could hear their audio translated in English in my ears with a few seconds of delay. When I was speaking in English, they could read the Chinese translation on the app.
It worked well with some small quirks when translating English and Chinese. When I tried Italian and Chinese, it was not very good, but this didn’t surprise me, because it is often the case with translators: even when I use Google Translate, I always translate Chinese to English. The only problem of the translation is that the little translation delay kills a bit the flow of the conversation, but it is not a huge deal.
Privacy
If you shoot photos, videos, or are in an AI session, there is a white LED that blinks to flag the people around you that a recording session is live. It works well.
Other Functionalities
These are other features the glasses have, but I could not try:
- Alipay payments: you can look at a QR code and pay for things with your glasses
- Live stream: You can livestream your camera feed, for instance, in WeChat video calls. Livestream is quite heavy on the battery
Extra
The glasses are certified as IP54 Class dustproof and are also waterproof. This means you can wear them even if you’re sweating or there is some rain, or you are outdoors, and there is some dust in the air. Probably Robert Scoble could take a shower with these.
As you can imagine, I couldn’t test this feature, even if it would have been funny to see the clerk throwing water and dust at me!
Price and Availability
Huawei AI Glasses are available only in China, either on the Huawei website or in a Huawei store. The price starts from 2,499 RMB ($368 circa).
Final impressions
The Huawei AI Glasses looked to me like a solid step into the smartglasses realm by Huawei. The device is well-manufactured, photos and videos have good resolution, audio is crisp, and the AI assistant does its job. The glasses are also ready for all-day usage thanks to the low weight and the long-lasting battery.
There are a couple of things I didn’t enjoy, though:
- Sometimes I felt the lack of a display. I know it’s a decision they have taken to keep the glasses lightweight, but vision is very important to me.
- I’m not a big fan of the design. Probably, Huawei should partner with an eyewear company to improve on this side. This is a very subjective opinion, though.
But the most important comment I make here and I will make in many reviews of smartglasses is: these glasses look too similar to many other Chinese smartglasses on the market. Huawei is bringing some nice evolutions, like a very long-lasting battery, but it is not bringing any big innovation in terms of design, use cases, or interactions.
The glasses are, in general, pretty good, though. I left the store with a good impression, and the hope that Huawei, one of the most important phone manufacturers in the world, is going to bring some big innovations in its future versions of smartglasses.