Startup Halo Unveils $249 AI Glasses With Always-On Microphone, Fueling Privacy Debate

Halo, a San Francisco-based startup founded by former Harvard students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, has opened pre-orders for Halo X, a pair of artificial-intelligence glasses that continuously record, transcribe and analyse conversations. The device, priced at $249, is supported by a $1 million seed round led by Pillar VC with backing from Soma Capital, Village Global and Morningside Venture. Halo X relies on always-on microphones and a heads-up display to surface real-time prompts generated by large-language models from Google’s Gemini and Perplexity. Audio is routed through a companion smartphone app for cloud processing; the company says recordings are deleted after transcription and plans to add end-to-end encryption and SOC 2 compliance. The glasses lack an external indicator light and place responsibility for consent on users, raising alarms among privacy advocates. Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that normalising covert recording could erode expectations of privacy and potentially violate two-party-consent laws in several U.S. states. Halo says it trusts customers to obtain consent and that data is not stored by its transcription provider Soniox.