Smart glasses with privacy in mind

Brilliant Labs, Neuphonic, and TheStage AI have announced a strategic partnership to enable frontier AI in smart glasses without the latency and privacy compromises of Cloud computing.

AI inference, such as audio or image analysis, relies on models hosted in the Cloud, creating unnecessary latency and risking user data exposure. This partnership aims to fix this by moving processing directly into the hardware, on the Edge, protecting sensitive point-of-view data and enhancing performance with faster response times.

This partnership has come about as Brilliant Labs is gearing up to the launch of Halo, its latest smart glasses. In addition to Edge vision inference, Halo will use Neuphonic’s Conversational AI models on an inference engine built by TheStage AI. This architecture aims to challenge the foundation of Cloud-dependent offerings from giants like Meta and Snap, placing user privacy at the core of the user experience. Recent investigations have raised questions about whether major platforms are going back on their privacy promises, and these concerns only grow further as AI systems expand beyond text into always-on microphones and cameras.

The partnership has safety at its core, offering intelligent wearables that keep sensitive visual and conversational data local, while delivering advanced AI through an open-source stack designed for transparency, trust, and independent scrutiny.

This partnership has a three prong approach:

• Brilliant Labs will release its AI memory feature through its open-source eyewear platform in one of the slimmest form factors available
• Neuphonic will deliver the conversational interface, where its ultra-low-latency text-to-speech technology runs locally, turning the device into a conversational partner with human-like responsiveness
• TheStage AI will provide an automated inference engine that optimises AI models to run efficiently on the Edge, ensuring instant processing without draining the battery

By merging strengths, Brilliant Labs will be able to deliver an AI wearable experience to its customers where voice, vision, and sensor data is processed locally on the user’s device: no raw point-of-view data ever leaves the user’s phone or glasses.

Brilliant’s glasses will support:

• Context-aware, conversational AI that sees and hears in real time
• Private memory that indexes what the user sees and hears for later recall and personalised context
• Vibe Mode, a natural-language interface that generates custom AI mini-apps on demand – from on-demand AI agents to enterprise workflows

“We believe in a privacy-first future for personal computing. AI glasses are soon going to be everywhere around us: always-on cameras and microphones capturing our lives. That’s either exciting or terrifying, depending on where that data lives and who is monetising it,” said Bobak Tavangar, CEO of Brilliant Labs and former Apple programme lead. “I don’t want my children growing up in a world where that data is sold to the highest bidder. This partnership shows there’s a better way. And by embracing open source, we want people to understand how these systems work, build upon them, and ultimately foster trust. That’s the standard we think the industry should be held to.”

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“When you’re having a conversation, speed and privacy are everything. You cannot wait for the Cloud to think,” said Sohaib Ahmad, CEO of Neuphonic. “We provide the ‘voice’ of this new ecosystem. By running our advanced speech models directly on Brilliant’s hardware, we’ve unlocked a conversational experience that feels real, immediate, and completely private.”

TheStage AI ensures this heavy lifting happens smoothly. “Great hardware and great models need a bridge, and that is what we build,” said Kirill Solodskikh, CEO at TheStage AI. “Running conversational AI on a pair of glasses is a massive computational challenge. You have to manage peak memory, latency, and power consumption to make responses feel immediate. Our core technology, ANNA, optimises Neuphonic’s models and supporting components, including transcription, wake word, and diarisation, so they run efficiently on a smartphone paired with the glasses. Deploying the optimised models on GPU and NPU accelerators delivers the best performance possible on-device.”