Brilliant Labs' $299 smart glasses remember who you meet

Running into someone whose face you know but whose name completely escapes you is a universal social nightmare. Brilliant Labs thinks it has a $299 fix for that.

The startup just announced the Halo, a sleek pair of smart glasses serving as the successor to last year's $349 open-source Frame. Priced squarely against Meta's entry-level Ray-Bans, the Halo is up for limited preorder in matte black, with shipping slated for late November 2025. Prescription lenses will be handled through a partnership with SmartBuyGlasses.

MicroOLED meets bone conduction

Unlike Meta, which keeps its smart glasses purely voice-driven, Brilliant Labs squeezed a tiny 0.2-inch color microOLED display into the frame.

The display projects what the company calls a retro arcade-style UI right into your peripheral vision. Audio is routed through bone-conduction speakers built into the arms, keeping whatever your assistant whispers strictly private.

Despite clocking in at just over 40 grams, slightly heavier than the Frame, the Halo promises up to 14 hours of battery life. That endurance comes courtesy of a low-power camera and an onboard AI chip equipped with a dedicated NPU.

The hardware is tied together by Noa, an upgraded multimodal AI agent that listens, watches, and surfaces real-time contextual help. You can also use expanded voice commands to put the glasses to sleep or mute the microphone.

Narrative memory and voice-built apps

The marquee feature here is Narrative, a patent-pending agentic memory system designed to act as an external hard drive for your brain.

Narrative gathers inputs from the glasses' camera, mics, and conversations to assemble a private, personalized knowledge base. When you run into someone you have met before, it quietly feeds you their name alongside contextual details from your previous conversations.

Brilliant Labs is also testing an experimental feature called Vibe Mode. Instead of browsing an app store, you speak natural language prompts to create custom mini-apps on the fly, like a personalized city transit utility tailored to your walking habits.

Why it matters

We think Brilliant Labs found a clever middle ground between Meta's audio-only frames and Silicon Valley's bulky AR headsets.

By keeping the weight near 40 grams and using a subtle peripheral microOLED, Halo gives you visual cues without looking like a piece of sci-fi headgear. At $299, it undercuts luxury gadgets while offering far more utility than audio-only competitors.

That said, an always-watching camera that logs people's identities and past conversations walks right into an ethical minefield. Convincing bystanders that Narrative is truly private will be a massive hurdle.

Vibe Mode also looks more like a developer novelty than a mainstream killer app right now. The real test in late November will be whether Narrative delivers dependable memory recall in the wild, or ends up feeling like an over-ambitious parlor trick.