Amazon Is Reportedly Working On Alexa-Enabled Smart Glasses (techcrunch.com)

According to the Financial Times (Warning: source paywalled), Amazon is working on building a pair of smart glasses to house its Alexa voice assistant. The report also mentions a home security camera that is in the works, capable of linking up to Amazon's existing Echo connected devices. TechCrunch reports: According to the FT, the smart glasses are intended to be purely an earbuds-free housing for Amazon's Alexa AI -- with a bone-conduction audio system that would enable the wearer to hear Alexa without the need to be wired in. The FT reports the glasses would wirelessly tether to a user's smartphone for connectivity. They are also apparently being designed to look like a regular pair of spectacles, so they could be worn comfortably and unobtrusively. The paper notes that Amazon hired Babak Parviz, founder of Google Glass, in 2014, and says he's been closely involved in the project. It also points to several other Glass researchers, engineers and designers having moved to Amazon's labs -- per analysis of their LinkedIn profiles.

Comments

This is exciting!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can imagine zero uses for this!

Re:Interesting

[JohnFen]

There was a lot useful in Google Glass, mostly around AR. The reason it failed wasn't a lack of usefulness.

Color me impressed when.....

[mark-t]

.... the tech cannot be distinguished from regular eyewear by any kind of cursory examination.

I have no interest in spying on people, but I do very much like the idea of having a life-recorder with which I can record my day's experiences without my having to reach for another recording device such as my smart phone, and I could go back later and review things that I experienced that I might wish to review some detail on for posterity that would otherwise be forever lost simply on account of an imperfect memory and the fact that I didn't have my phone ready to record at that precise moment.

However, I don't particularly want to get my ass handed to me by people who think I'm wanting to spy on them every time I go out wearing such a device... or interested in uploading content to the internet or whatever, so I would rather that the device be completely invisible to onlookers.