RayNeo iO Smart Glasses full review: a strong focus on audio

Last week, RayNeo launched its iO Smart Glasses, a pair of camera-free smart glasses meant to increase productivity and help users in their daily life. I immediately wrote a “first impression” article, highlighting how they clearly seem a good product, but I also stated that I needed more time to evaluate their usability, comfort, and especially utility. In this article, I will expand on the previous one, going into (a lot) more details about everything related to this device so as to finally write a full review of these glasses. Especially, I will answer one important question: are these glasses worth buying? Keep reading to discover it

[Disclaimer: RayNeo provided me with a unit of smart glasses to write this review]

RayNeo iO Smart Glasses

RayNeo, a subsidiary of the tech giant TCL, has been one of the most active companies in the smartglasses sector in the last couple of years. I’ve already reviewed on this blog the RayNeo X3 Pro, which are probably the smartglasses with the best display I’ve ever tried (but it comes at a price). The company actually produces different types of devices, ranging from media-consumption glasses to audio smart glasses à la Ray-Ban Meta, not to mention smart glasses with a display. It literally has smart glasses for all tastes.

With the new RayNeo iO Smart Glasses, RayNeo surely wants to appeal to people who are not comfortable with a camera on their face. The glasses feature a display but not a camera, and this makes sure that they are not only very lightweight, but also privacy-oriented. RayNeo iO Smart Glasses are clearly inspired by the Even Realities glasses, which have become pretty successful in certain niches. The mission of these glasses is not the one of helping you shoot photos or videos like Ray-Ban Meta, but to offer a companion that can make you smarter and more productive thanks to AI. AI can listen to what you and the other people around you are saying, and so it can help you with your everyday activities. And if you are a deaf person, they can surely help you listen to what the people around you are saying thanks to their live-captioning functionalities.

But are they really delivering on these promises? Well, mostly yes, but there are some very important caveats you should be aware of. The remainder of the article will let you know everything about these glasses as you had tried them yourself.

Unboxing

I pretty much enjoyed unboxing the RayNeo iO Smart Glasses. The box has an elegant gray color, and inside, all the elements are arranged in a pretty tidy way. The case containing the glasses is also nice. You can see my full unboxing in the video below:

Specifications

Here are some specs of the RayNeo iO Smart Glasses, courtesy of RayNeo:

• Weight: 33g
• Display:
  • Firefly Nano Optical Engine
  • Micro LED + Diffractive Waveguide
  • Monochrome green
  • 1200 nits
• Display Area:
  • Transparency: 97%
  • FOV: 23.5°
• Audio:
  • Array 4 Mic + 1 Bone Conduction Microphones
• Interactions:
  • Smart Crown
  • Voice Control
  • Head Gesture
• Battery:
  • Capacity: 240mAh
  • Typical duration：48h
  • Standby duration (Worn): 63h
  • Standby duration (Folded): 250h
  • Continuous Translation duration: 6.2h
  • Continuous Teleprompter duration: 6.6h

Design

The glasses are thin as advertised. They almost look like regular glasses. Let me show you some pictures of them from all points of view.

The most important thing to notice is that there are no cameras on these glasses. So these glasses don’t risk to freak the people around you. There are also no speakers, and this contributes to making the frame incredibly thin. Thanks to the little hardware that is installed, it’s hard for people around you to understand that you are wearing smartglasses: the only real telling sign is the display, which leaks green light to the outside. Otherwise, no one would be able to tell you don’t have regular glasses.

Regarding the fashionability, RayNeo iO Smart Glasses have an essential design, not something that has been created by a fashion expert. At least on me, they don’t look very cool. I mean, they don’t even look bad: people around me told me I just look “ok” with them. I made my Chinese assistant try them, and she definitely looked better, so I guess the fit depends a lot on the face.

They also feel as if they are a tiny bit more distant from the eyes than regular glasses (at least on my big nose), and this contributes to not giving me an amazing look.

Comfort

RayNeo iO Smart Glasses are thin and lightweight: they only weigh 33 grams. RayNeo did an incredible job in trying to make these glasses as small and comfortable as possible. When you wear them, you can feel that they are very light. Thanks to the lack of cameras and speakers, the frames are also incredibly thin, as I already told you before. RayNeo also worked hard to make the weight of the glasses pretty balanced. This is why the first moment I put on the glasses, I felt very good with them.

But this is a device meant for day-long wearability: the promise is to have an assistant that is always with you, improving your life. So I wore these glasses for like 8 hours straight. And the results were not as good as I hoped for: after more than one hour, I started feeling some discomfort in the three places where the glasses lie on my head, that is, the top of the nose and the area around my two ears. I tried to tweak the nose pad, to bend the frames a bit in a different way, to change how I fit them, but nothing helped in this sense. After 8 hours, I really couldn’t stand the glasses anymore: when I removed them, I noticed that they left big signs on my nose and a red area around my ears.

Ergonomics is very subjective, so I can’t tell how these glasses sit on other people’s faces. I can only tell that on my face, they can only be comfortable for like one hour. I personally think the fit needs a huge redesign.

One thing that I don’t understand, for instance, is why there are such thin legs, but then a big protrusion at the end of them.

It’s not exactly clear to me why they have been made this way, probably to make sure that the glasses do not slip and stay attached to the head even when you move it. Probably this also helps in the perfect balancing of the weight that the company claims in its marketing material. But these big things exercise some pressure in the area between my ears and my skull, and while in the short term it is not a big deal, in the long term, they make me feel an annoying pressure sensation. The company also provides two transparent rubber covers for the end of the frames: these are probably meant to let the skin of your ears touch the rubber and not directly the metal of the glasses. And actually, these elements (which I happily nicknamed “the glasses’ condoms”) provide a benefit in this sense, because my skin has a better sensation while touching them, but they also make the end of the frames even thicker than before, increasing the pressure of the frames close to the ears.

Regarding the nose, I may have some discomfort because I have a big nose. In the box there is a new nose pad, and I thought it had a different shape to accommodate bigger noses, but it actually has the same shape as the stock one installed on the glasses. So I did not have great luck in improving the comfort in this sense, either.

These are glasses meant as a day-long companion, so it is important they can be comfortable to wear for many hours. After my tests, I have to say that while on paper they totally deliver, in reality they did not, at least for me. I have seen other reviewers not complaining about comfort, so probably it depends a lot on the shape of your head and face.

Display

RayNeo iO Smart Glasses feature a dual monochrome display. The FOV is just above 23°, but it is well enough for showing some notifications on the screen. I would have liked it to be a bit bigger, especially for the moments when there is more text on screen, like the teleprompter, but let’s say that the system is anyway usable with the FOV it has.

Text is very readable, and the brightness is definitely good. If you put the brightness at its maximum, 1200 nits, you can even have outdoor readability. I tried looking at the sky on a sunny day with them, and I could still perceive some of the writing. They do their best indoors, where you have maximum clarity, but you can also have some usability outdoors.

The lenses are also very transparent, so this doesn’t darken the world around you. I’ve literally almost no complaints about the display: as a display to show textual notifications, it is very good. TCL proves again to be a great company when it comes to making displays.

The only complaint I have is about where the display is. These glasses have the display in the upper part of your vision, which is a bit weird because our eyes are usually comfortable looking in front of them or slightly below them. The good thing about this decision is that this means that even when there is some notification, it doesn’t occlude your natural field of view; it is absolutely not obtrusive. The bad news is that when I tried to look at the display for a prolonged time (e.g., for the teleprompter), I started feeling some slight eye strain. And the reason is that, as I’ve said, eyes are not very comfortable constantly looking up. So this choice is fine for notifications you have to briefly look at, but not fine for prolonged reads like the teleprompter and the live caption. There is also another side effect of this position: it can be weird for the people you are speaking with to see you constantly looking up. Yesterday I was having a meeting with the live captions on, and while I was reading the captions, a colleague of mine asked: “Tony, are you listening to me?”

You can move the display area a bit down via the companion app, but then you risk having the writing in front of your eyes, which may occlude your view of the world. So there is no good solution for this problem.

The display has no privacy feature. From the outside, everyone can see you’re using smart glasses. Even more, they can even read the text that you have in front of your eyes. So if you have very sensitive information to consume, do not read it on these glasses.

Audio

I usually write in these reviews that “I’m not an audio expert, so I can just comment that audio works, but I can not tell you much about the quality”. In this case, it will be different because the glasses don’t feature any speaker. They don’t speak; they just show stuff on the screen. I guess this choice has been made to keep the price and the weight low, but I’m honestly a bit puzzled by that. Speakers can be useful, especially when interacting with the AI assistant: usually you ask a question to the AI with your voice, and it answers you with its own voice. In this case, you ask with your voice and then read the answer with your eyes, which is a bit less natural. Having only written feedback seemed a bit limiting to me.

Having no speaker also means that you can’t have phone calls through the smartglasses or that you can’t listen to music. These are two very popular use cases of competitors like Ray-Ban Meta, which are not available on the RayNeo iO. Considering that there is no camera, either, this means that all the most popular use cases of Ray-Ban Meta are not available on this device, putting it basically in a totally different category.

The positive side effect of the lack of speakers, a part from the reduced weight, is that the interaction is less obtrusive. The glasses don’t speak at you while you are speaking with others, and they don’t risk disturbing those around you with their audio. They show you notifications you can just ignore by not looking at them. It is all very subtle.

While there are no speakers, the headset features a good array of microphones that can hear not only you, but also the people around you. The array of microphones is also able to detect who is speaking: they can understand if the audio comes from you, the person in front of you, or people around you. From my tests, the mics worked pretty well: the glasses have always understood what I was saying. And they also worked surprisingly well in detecting the source of the voice: they could separate in the logs when it was me speaking and when it was someone close to me.

Battery

The battery is definitely a superpower of this device. The company claims that for normal usage, the battery can last up to 2 days. For continuous use of translation, it should last more than 6 hours. It is quite a lot, so RayNeo did a great job in this sense.

For sure, the fact that there are no cameras and speakers helps a lot in reducing the battery consumption. But RayNeo also made sure that the glasses save as much battery as they can. For instance, the notifications stay on the screen just a few seconds, and then they go away: this has the double effect of not cluttering the view of the user and at the same time saving on battery.

From my tests, I can absolutely confirm these claims. During one of the days when I tested the glasses for my review, I wore the glasses for around 8 hours with the Life Log feature enabled. I also tested a few other functions. And in 8 hours of use (so not standby), the battery went down just 40%. This means that I could have clearly used the glasses for the whole day on a single charge. I was absolutely impressed by experiencing this.

It’s bizarre that the glasses can’t be turned off. So either they are in use, or they are in some form of standby. While I traveled from Southern Italy to Northern Italy, I put them in my suitcase, and I left the glasses unused for a couple of days. When I turned them on again, I noticed they lost 30-40% of the battery. On one side, I was glad to see that they consumed very little battery in this long standby time, while on the other I was pretty pissed off I couldn’t turn them off and completely save the battery.

RayNeo iO Smart Glasses do not feature a USB-C port. They have two pins under the lens bridge, and there you attach a special charging adapter that features a USB-C port you can connect to whatever charger. At first, I had some difficulties understanding how to clip this adapter, but after I got used to it, I found it pretty easy to use. Maybe it is a bit clunky to detach, but nothing major. I guess the choice of the adapter has been made so the regular glasses don’t have to include the big USB port and its related circuitry, and can be thin and balanced.

Charging the battery is also rather fast, and you can just leave the glasses for a few hours during the night to find them the morning after fully charged. During the charge, the lateral LED becomes green.

The case

The glasses come with a nice case made in leatherette. There are two models for the case: one that can charge the battery of the glasses while you don’t use them and then a standard one. I have the standard one, and I think it’s pretty nice: it is not anything special, but it’s crafted well and looks pretty elegant. Here you are a couple of pictures I’ve shot for you:

Interactions

You can interact with the RayNeo iO Smart Glasses in three ways:

• The crown: there is a little crown close to your right temple. You can rotate the crown to switch between items in a list or a menu; you can click it to confirm the current element, and you can also double-click it to open the AI assistant. I personally liked this choice of the crown: I found it easier to use than the usual swipe on the leg of the glasses, especially for two reasons. First of all, rotating such a small crown just requires a small movement of the finger, so it is less “tiresome” than a full swipe. And then the crown is deterministic: you can clearly feel it, and when you rotate it, you’re sure the glasses got your input. When you swipe instead, you’re never fully sure you did it in the right swipe area and not in some random point of the legs of the frame

• Voice control: these glasses are very focused on voice interactions. Of course, voice is involved in everything related to transcription. But you can also use voice commands through AI: if you invoke the AI assistant in certain languages (like Chinese or English), you can also ask it to do some actions. For instance, if you say “Hey RayNeo, open the teleprompter”, it will open the teleprompter for you.
• Head gesture: when there is a system notification, you can nod with your head to approve it, or move your head left-to-right in disappointment to reject it. It’s a new, interesting way of interacting with smart glasses. Anyway, even if I have activated it in my settings, I never had a moment where I could actually test it.

The display of the glasses also goes in stand by after a few seconds (usually 15s) if you don’t interact with them. But if you look up with your head, the display turns on automatically again. It’s cool that you can turn on the display without having to move your hands. This is also very handy if you want to check what the time is now: you just have to rotate your head up and see it. This interaction suffers a bit of the “Mida’s Touch” problem, though: sometimes I just look up for other reasons and seeing the display turning on is a bit unexpected. I remember at a certain point I had a kind of desperation moment, and I looked up, as if I needed the help of God, and the glasses turned on and showed me the time. Well, it was not the kind of help I was looking for from above, but thanks for telling me it’s 11:52 am anyway.

In general, I appreciated the way of interacting with these glasses: it is easy and effective. But things become even easier if you use the companion app.

Companion app

There is a companion RayNeo AI app that you have to install on your phone to use the glasses. Surprisingly, it is not the same app that I had to install to review the RayNeo X3 Pro, I guess because this one is much heavier on AI.

The companion app is very similar to other companion apps of other smartglasses. Through it, you can:

• Configure your glasses: you can change the brightness of the display, the content of the dashboard, the perceived distance of the display, the language used by the AI assistant, and a lot of other options

• Launch the applications: instead of interacting with the menu of the glasses using the crown, you can just launch the various applications like the Transcription or the Teleprompter using the mobile app. I would say it is much more handy, because through the app you can also configure the settings of every app before launching it
• Configure the applications: every application on the glasses has some settings. For instance, when you launch Live Captions, you can specify what language the people around you are speaking. Surprisingly, you can’t do that in the glasses, and you have to configure it in the mobile app. This makes the app great for configuring what you want to do and then launching the related experience
• Read the documentation: the mobile app features a vast documentation about the glasses. There are many help pages describing all the features with text and images. The app also features suggestions, links to the RayNeo social accounts, and so on. All of this is very handy for people who are beginners in the smart glasses world.

The companion app is pretty well made and has a lot of options and information inside. RayNeo put a lot of effort into it, and I think it’s fundamental to install it, because it makes the experience of using the glasses much better. The experience of using the app was so good that I almost did not use the glasses menu anymore: I just configured, launched, and closed all the glasses applications using the mobile app.

Setup

Configuring these glasses was a matter of a few minutes. I had to install the companion app, create a RayNeo account, and then do the Bluetooth pairing between the glasses and my mobile phone. I had a few little problems doing the pairing because I didn’t understand that the pairing strictly required the legs of the glasses to be folded to happen. But that was the only moment I had some difficulties during the setup.

After the pairing, the firmware of my glasses was upgraded. And then, the app showed some “quick guide” screens to help me understand how to get started with the glasses. This was definitely good to give me some instructions to start with. I have appreciated this choice by RayNeo of taking the hand of the users during their first instants of using the device.

After this last step, the glasses were ready to be used.

Applications and software experience

In my previous article, I just gave you a brief description of the various functionalities of the glasses. Now I finally have enough experience to describe to you in detail what the applications offered are and how well they work.

The dashboard

When you launch the glasses, you are presented with the dashboard, which is basically your “home” screen, the one you see when you turn on the display either by clicking on the crown or by looking up.

RayNeo had this smart idea of making the dashboard configurable with the mobile app. The dashboard is composed of small “widgets”, and you can choose which widgets you want to see: there are not many widgets available, but there are a few nice ones showing things like the current time, the weather, your to-do list, or the stock market. Since the FOV of the glasses is limited, you can just see two widgets on your home screen. If you add more, they end up on a second page of the dashboard that you can access by rotating the crown.

I noticed that the second page of the dashboard is more or less like the second page of the Google results: you almost never go there. So choose wisely what to put in your first screen of the dashboard. I think a mandatory widget to have is the time, so you’re just left with another widget that you want to see every time you turn on the device. The default one is the to-do list.

The main menu

You can open the main menu by clicking on the crown once, and scroll through the list of apps by rotating the crown itself. When you have found the app of interest, you can click on the crown to launch it. As I’ve said above, you have also two alternate ways of launching the apps: one is asking the AI assistant to do that for you; and the other is launching the application via the mobile app.

In the video below, you can see both the dashboard and the menu in action.

Voice Memo

Voice Memo lets you record some vocal notes. You just launch the application on the glasses or hit the record button in the mobile app, and then you can say whatever you want to be recorded (e.g. some notes about some work you have to do). Then you close the application (or press the record button again in the mobile app) to stop the recording of the memo. And voilà, your voice notes have been recorded!

You can access all the recorded memos via the mobile app. You can listen to them again, and you can also use the AI to transcribe them, summarize them, and even share them with someone else via a link. As I’ve said, the mobile app is pretty powerful, and lets you do a lot of things with these memos.

I tried the voice memo feature, and it works. I mean, it is basically just an audio recorder with AI transcriptions, and both of them are state-of-the-art technologies, so I wasn’t expecting anything different.

Live Captions

Live Captions is another standard feature of many smartglasses. It transcribes what people around you are saying and shows it to you on the display of the glasses.

Through the mobile app you can configure:

• The language of the speakers
• If you want not only a transcription, but also a translation of what is said into your own language
• If you want a transcription only of what the person in front of you is saying, or also of what all the people around you are saying.

In front of your eyes, you see the glasses writing a live captioning of what is being said by the people around you (you don’t see what you are saying). But at the same time, the mobile app also logs the whole transcription of the dialogue, this time also writing what you are saying. If translation is enabled, the app shows the text in both languages.

As I said for the Voice Memo, also for Live Captions, the app saves all the conversations you had, letting you read them again and have AI summarize them for you.

In my tests, this feature worked pretty well, provided I had a good internet connection (I say so because my early tests when I was with poor internet connection in Southern Italy were less positive). The transcription was not 100% perfect, but definitely very good in all three languages that I tried: English, Chinese, and even Italian. The reaction times were definitely short, and there was only a slight delay between what the other person was saying and when I was reading the text. The translation between Chinese and English worked, and here the delay was slightly higher, but not that bad. It was still short enough that I could have a fluent conversation. I also tried to switch between listening only to the person in front of me to all the people around me, and it worked too, with the glasses able to discern if the voice was coming from my front direction or a lateral one. If I chose to only transcribe the person in front of me, all lateral voices were ignored.

I definitely don’t have many complaints about this functionality… it worked well. As I’ve said, there are tiny errors in the transcriptions, but they are not frequent, so they are not a big deal. I had a small quirk when I was testing the Chinese-to-English translation: I was the English speaker, but at a certain point I said 什么 in Chinese, and my display immediately switched all to Chinese. Lesson learned: I will never say 什么 again. I was also a bit disappointed in seeing that the transcription automatically censors bad words: I am adult enough, and some communications rely 80% on bad words, so I don’t know why they should be censored…

I think Live Captioning is definitely a great feature for people with hearing impairments. I remember someone telling me that Even Realities are already kinda popular in some deaf people’s communities, and I think RayNeo iO Smart Glasses can reach the same success. It is also great for speaking with people from other countries.

Teleprompter

The teleprompter app is… a teleprompter. You can enter a text in the mobile app, and then the glasses show it in front of your eyes. Since the glasses can understand what you are saying, they can scroll the text automatically for you. The teleprompter shows you like 6 lines of text, and when you reach the 4th or 5th line, they scroll up one line, so you can keep reading. There are also other ways of scrolling the text, like scrolling at an automated pace, or manual scrolling, but the one based on what you read is definitely the best.

This feature worked well, too. The system always understood what I was reading and scrolled it when I was reaching the end of the visible text. It’s just a bit disturbing that when the system automatically scrolls a line, the text abruptly jumps up one line while you are reading, and you have to be careful not to miss the mark of where you were in the text. The other thing that is a bit annoying is the fact that the text is up in your field of view. Looking up with your eyes for a long time can be tiresome, as I’ve said. Plus, I’m not sure that people listening to you will enjoy the fact that you are keeping looking up all the time: it doesn’t feel very natural.

Live Cues

Live Cues is one of those features that are meant to really integrate AI in a natural way in the lives of people. When you open this app, the glasses enter into a special mode where they keep listening but do not transcribe anything. They instead try to understand your conversations and automatically detect if they can be useful to you. If so, the AI will give you some information that is contextually relevant. Imagine that you are speaking with friends and you don’t remember what the capital of Paraguay is (it’s a classic situation that happens every day to all of you, I guess), so you say “oh, you know, there, in the capital of Paraguay… what was the name?”, and the glasses come to the rescue and write “The capital of Paraguay is Asunción”. This would be very helpful. Live Cues is meant to do exactly that: retrieve information when you need it.

Notice that the feature does not require explicitly invoking the AI: it is the AI that understands the context and provides you with contextual info that may be useful for you. You can ignore it (it is just a silent 5-second notification), or you can use that information to look smarter in front of your peers. It’s actually pretty cool on paper.

In practice… not so much. In my experience, to trigger the AI, you still have to say out loud a clear question. If I say “What is the capital of Italy?”, Live Cues answers with “The capital of Italy is Rome” and that is cool. But it is not able to understand where I may need help in general: for instance, if I’m speaking with other people around Italy and its capital, it never comes up with the fact that the capital is Rome.

I made a test of this feature by having a full work meeting with my colleagues talking about projects, and it did not come up with a single suggestion. I mean, at least try to say something. Say “The capital of Paraguay is Asunción” even if no one asked for it just to show you know shit. I admit I was pretty disappointed.

As the meme says, “sounds good… doesn’t work”. But it is still in beta, so let’s give this feature some time to grow.

Life Log

Life Log is another powerful feature of these glasses. You turn it on, and then you forget about it. The glasses will record all the audio activity that they perceive and log all your conversations and all your GPS positions to give you a complete diary of your day. It’s cool that Life Log can operate in multiple languages together: I selected Italian, English, and Chinese, for instance. At the end of the day, you can look back via the mobile app and see the list of all the activities of the day, with all their related transcripts. Of course, AI can make a summary of the day, telling you what you have achieved.

Notice that the capture is not related to a single day: the app has a calendar that records all your activities for all the days you’re using the glasses. The interface of these calendar logs not only includes the conversations recorded by the Life Log feature, but also what you did through the other apps, that is, the Voice Memos, the transcriptions, and so on. Basically, everything you do with the glasses is catalogued and organized in temporal order by the app. And then you can ask RayNeo AI to do some analysis of this.

This is a very intriguing feature, and I have to say that it mostly works, but there is one big flaw. It mostly works because when I kept it on for hours, it really recorded all my conversations. And it was able to understand Italian, Chinese, and English without me specifying the language. I have to tell you that the quality of the transcription was worse than the one I obtained with the Live Transcription app, also because I don’t always speak very clearly at every moment of my day… sometimes I may whisper, or there may be some background noises. Plus, the AI had to infer what language I was speaking every time. But still, even with some errors, transcriptions were mostly correct. And when I asked AI to summarize what I did during the day, it made a pretty good summary. It was even able to create to-do list items from that. It was pretty impressive, even if I have to say again that transcriptions, summarization, and bullet point list extraction are things that now AI does everywhere. My Chinese assistant commented on it with “in China now we even sell computer mice with AI integrated that does these things”. But still, making it work so well all day with multiple language support is a very nice feat.

The big flaw of this “life log” is what the company markets as the strongest point of these glasses: there is no camera. The summary of my day included some personal conversations, plus some phone calls I had trying to buy a product. The AI couldn’t spot any work I did, because my work as a developer and blogger is silent. I don’t scream lines of code while I’m writing them, so the glasses were absolutely not aware of all the work I did. Or all the emails I sent. The summary was so very incomplete. And even regarding the audio conversations, it was not complete either: when I have phone calls, I usually wear earphones, so the glasses couldn’t hear what the other person was saying. These are huge problems with this “Life Log” feature.

One last detail worth a mention: when the Life Log is on, my phone is consuming the battery faster than usual.

AI Asisstant

You can invoke the AI Assistant by double-tapping on the crown or by saying “Hey RayNeo”. The assistant will show you a notification, and then you can start asking it questions. I guess we are all familiar with AI assistants nowadays, so I don’t need to say much about it. I’ll just say that it only replies with written answers because there are no speakers, and it can retrieve updated information by browsing the web. My experience with it was ok.

You can also ask questions to the AI via the app. In the app you can also ask AI to summarize conversations, or to analyze your daily logs.

RayNeo claims you can choose the AI model you want. By default, RayNeo AI is selected, but you can easily switch to Gemini Flash or other popular AI models.

Notifications

The glasses can show you notifications associated with certain apps, if you give them the permission to do so. For instance, if someone is calling you, you can see it on the glasses, but then you have to answer with your phone, because, again, these glasses have no speakers.

There is a “Focus” mode you can activate on the glasses so as not to be disturbed by notifications while you’re working. Notifications are the only moment where I’m glad the display is up in my view: this way they don’t occlude what I have in front of me, and I can easily get a glimpse of them and then ignore them.

Privacy features

The glasses don’t have a camera, and this is a great advantage to guarantee the privacy of the user, and also of the people around the user.

Or at least, this is what it seems at first thought. But these glasses have taught me that privacy is a more complex topic than just evaluating if there is a camera or not. RayNeo iO Glasses have features like Life Log that keep analyzing with AI all the audio around you. They keep listening to you and to all the people around you and transcribe everything they hear and save the information on some servers. Then all this data is given to AI to analyze. All of this is not exactly the privacy heaven that is advertised.

Sure, RayNeo claims that it does its best to protect your data and has gained a lot of data management certifications like GDPR. But GDPR is only a certification that says that the company is transparent about the data usage and that it is only recording data that it actually needs. It is a very vague definition of safety. And in fact, the privacy policy of these glasses says that RayNeo may use your personal data to “provide and improve” the services at its own discretion. This is not something that makes me feel completely secure.

The problem is not only about the user, but also about the people around him/her. The company says you should disclose to everyone you speak to that you are using audio-recording glasses, but this is simply impossible. At a certain point, you just forget you left the glasses with recording on. In fact, at the end of my Life Log experiment, I was surprised by the amount of personal information it collected from my conversations.

RayNeo at least thought about automatically warning the people around you about the fact that you are recording and added a privacy LED that turns on when you are recording any audio. The idea was definitely good, but the execution not so much: the LED has been put at the end of the frames, close to the ears of the user. Because of its position and luminosity, I can guarantee you that no one is ever going to notice that. And if the wearer has long hair, it is for sure going to be occluded.

Add to all this mix that there is no way to turn off the device: the glasses are always on, and the app keeps constantly trying to connect to them even if the glasses are not nearby. So the only way to be sure they are not recording you is to let the battery die (and this is exactly what I’m doing now).

There is also another small level of privacy to talk about: the privacy about what you are doing on the glasses. Since the display leaks what you are doing to the people in front of you, you had better not manage sensitive information with this device. People in front of you may partially read them.

So, notwithstanding the absence of a camera, these glasses still have potential privacy concerns. They are less than camera-equipped glasses, but are still worth a lot of care.

Price and availability

RayNeo iO Smart Glasses are available for purchase on the RayNeo website. The price is $499 with the standard case, or $549 with the charging case. In this first phase of launch, the glasses have a $50 discount.

General impressions

After spending some time with them, I can definitely say that RayNeo iO Smart Glasses are a good product: the glasses are thin and lightweight, the screen is readable, the battery lasts long, there are a lot of AI integrations, the transcription and translation features work, and the crown offers a very efficient interaction. I can definitely see the potential of these devices.

There are two big problems for me, though. One is the comfort: for the shape of my head, they are absolutely uncomfortable. I’m pretty sure the experience may be better for some of you and worse for others. But I have to report my personal impressions, and they are not positive in this sense: I would not wear them for 8 hours a day.

The second problem is the absence of a camera and speakers, which prevents a lot of interesting use cases from happening. With these glasses, I can’t shoot photos and videos, listen to music, or talk with AI. They are all about listening and transcribing, which is interesting, but a bit limiting.

And the glasses aren’t cheap: the retail price of $500 is much higher than that of Ray-Ban Meta. It is cheaper than the Even Realities G2, though, and I’m pretty sure that RayNeo set its price exactly to compete with these glasses, which are in the exact same category.

Should you buy them?

As I told you, RayNeo iO Smart Glasses is an interesting device. But the real question is if it is interesting for you, and my answer is that it is if you are a fit for the use cases it allows. I think three types of people should definitely buy it:

• People who want to look cool at tech events and say “I have these AI-powered smartglasses that give me smart suggestions”
• Deaf people, who can definitely use these ones for transcription and translation
• People whose work (and life) revolves a lot around physical meetings. For instance, people selling houses or cars. The glasses could record all the conversations, and then provide useful logs, to-dos, and suggestions.

If you are in these groups of people, go for it and buy them. Make a test of their comfort when you receive them, and if the comfort is good, enjoy your glasses.

If you are not in these categories of users, I would advise you to think carefully before buying them. I am personally not going to use them much, because the comfort is not good for me, but also especially because I don’t see a great utility for my job. I mostly write, either blog posts or source code, and audio glasses are not going to help me much with that. And for my personal life, I prefer not having glasses listening to my private conversations all the time.

So, as I’ve said, evaluate the features that they offer, and make your decision. And if you need any suggestions, feel free to ask me in the comment section below or on social media, and I will do my best to answer you.

(PS: Reviews like this take me a lot of time to write: if you enjoyed this post, would you mind sharing it on your social media channels to increase my outreach or donating some money to me on Patreon? Thanks a lot!)