Over the last few months, smart glasses have taken their lumps — and rightfully so — as reports of people using the devices to harass women and post videos on social media have proliferated, as have reports of others doctoring their glasses to hide the fact that they were recording video.
Vonder, a company launching a new collection of smart glasses, thinks that its eyewear not only addresses the creepiness factor, but also delivers a set of smart specs that are more useful than anything from Meta or Google.
That’s because, rather than focusing on helping you with discrete tasks — playing music, looking up recipes, translations, getting directions — they’re designed to work quietly in the background, observing everything you do during the day, in order to provide more holistic advice and guidance based on your past decisions and preferences — and, do it more stylishly than anyone else.
I had a chance to check out Vonder's glasses, and while I'll need to test them out more throughly, they do offer a unique angle that could help distinguish them from better known competitors.
To be clear, Vonder’s glasses can play music, provide turn-by-turn navigation (using audio routed from a phone mapping app), make calls, and set calendar appointments using nothing but your voice. But using the glasses for just those activities would be missing the point.
Vonder takes everything it knows about you and creates a map of your mind, which it calls a Personal Memory Graph, and attempts to draw connections between everything. The founders showed me a visualization of his Memory Graph, which looked like a constellation of stars with lines interlinking everything. Some of the points, which represented ideas or things more central to his life, had far more lines extending from them.
That way, when you do ask the glasses for something, it will look through everything it knows about you, and then route it through what it thinks is the most appropriate LLM (at the moment, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini) to make a more personalized recommendation.
For example, if you ask for a coffee shop nearby, it may filter your request through Gemini, but provide Google’s AI with personalized information on the type of coffee you prefer, so that the results are more tailored.
Vonder is being launched by the folks behind Viture, which has to this point been focused on making XR and AR glasses, such as the Viture Beast and Viture Pro. However, the Vonder take a much different tack.
The Vonder glasses use bone-conducting microphones to filter out other voices, and capture only what you’re saying throughout the day. If you want to record a conversation, you can press a button on the side of the glasses. A small white LED will light up to let them know.
The Vonder glasses use bone-conducting microphones to filter out other voices, and capture only what you’re saying throughout the day. If you want to record a conversation with someone else, you can press a button on the side of the glasses; a small white LED on the left temple will light up to let them know.
Similar to what Apple is doing with Siri on the Apple Watch, Vonder’s glasses don’t record transcripts; rather, it summarizes what you and others say.
Because the glasses are relatively tech-lite — there’s no display or camera — they’re also quite light when compared to other smart glasses. All of the gadgetry is housed in the temples, so that it’s a lot easier for the company to develop different styles for the face of the glasses.
I briefly tried on a pair of the Vonder glasses, and was impressed at how light they were. At 30 grams, they’re about 40% lighter than the Ray-Ban Metas. However, the battery life of both pairs of specs are about the same — 8 hours.
At launch, the Vonder glasses will come in six frame styles (chicly named Antwerp, Paris, Basel, Oslo, Palermo, and Tribeca) and can also be outfitted with a variety of lenses, including prescription, transition, and other tints.
Pricing starts at $299 for the Basel model in basic black. All six styles are available with acetate frames in Smoke and Whiskey for $399. Transitions lenses and other lens options may add to the price. You’ll be able to order the glasses from Vonder’s site, as well as Bestbuy.com.
However, to get the most out of Vonder’s glasses, you’ll need to pay for a subscription, which starts at $9.99 per month. With that, you get all-day memory capture, the ability to connect to multiple apps, up to five insights per day, and Vonder’s “Medium” level AI. A $99/month subscription gets you its highest-tier AI and unlimited voice requests.
Vonder’s cofounder, David Jiang, told me that the company would like to eventually include a waveguide display, but the technology isn’t miniaturized enough yet. Also coming, but in the nearer future, is a beta feature that will let you use Vonder’s voice control alongside Claude Code and Codex, so that you can collaborate with the coding agent by speaking to it.
Every company that makes smart glasses — or any wearable AI assistant — is having to grapple anew with the balance between an always-on, always-listening device and the importance of respecting other people’s privacy. Vonder’s approach of only recording what you say by deafult could be a possible path forward.
But beyond privacy issues, Vonder’s approach to AI in its smart glasses is one where other companies, like Meta with its Muse AI, are headed. They’re no longer about helping you with individual asks, but rather, getting to know you better. Is that creepy or ingenious?
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds.
More from Tom's Guide
- I swapped my Ray-Ban Metas for these $20 smart glasses just to mock them — then they actually impressed me
- I just went hands-on with the new Samsung smart glasses — here’s why I’d pick them over Meta
- I’ve traveled over 50,000 miles testing smart glasses in 2026 — here are my 3 favorites that have launched this year so far
