Smart-glasses maker Vuzix has taken a step into the artificial intelligence realm. The company has partnered with TeamOpenSmartGlasses to develop ChatGPT AI applications for its glasses.
Conversation enhancement tools for all-day wearable smart glasses are under development, with an aim to improve meetings and conversations with live information that enhances user understanding of conversations, officials say. Vuzix’s smart glasses use augmented reality.
“AR and AI are the perfect match of two game-changing technologies and this partnership represents one of the first real AI implementation efforts with smart glasses,” says Paul Travers, president and CEO of Vuzix. “Applications such as those being developed by TOSG have the potential to revolutionize the communication and understanding of both diverse and complex information.”
TOSG, a team of developers, startups, and universities, has developed a pipeline to connect smart glasses directly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT API. Development is enabled by the SmartGlassesManager, a smart glasses software framework that allows developers to rapidly build apps that run on any pair of smart glasses.
The apps under development include a contextual search engine that looks for information relevant to the conversation at hand and presents it on smart glasses. ChatGPT meeting tools summarize conversations, ask questions on a discussion, and enable chats with the AI tool on smart glasses. A fact checker listens to conversations and fact checks in real time.
“We’ve seen great progress making virtual conversations more like real life, but the content of conversations (in real life) and virtual remains unenhanced. We’re bringing the power of real-time search and AI into conversations to enhance our ability to understand, communicate, and think,” says Cayden Pierce, team lead at TeamOpenSmartGlasses.
“Smart glasses are the next major consumer computing platform, and Vuzix is a world leader in smart glasses hardware, so I believe this partnership of Vuzix hardware and TOSG open source AI tools has the potential to radically enhance how people converse and think.”
In another collaboration, Vuzix will work with Materialise NV, a 3D printing technology company. By integrating 3D printing into the manufacturing process, Vuzix and Materialise aim to accelerate the development of new innovations for enterprise applications, from warehouses to operating rooms, the company says. The alliance will allow for technology, sports, and entertainment brands to rapidly introduce smart eyewear using Vuzix’s components and designs.
Examples of consumer applications of smart eyewear using Vuzix components include on-screen displays of speed and heart rate for athletes and augmented reality gaming. Vuzix and Materialise expect to provide third-party original equipment manufacturers with a flexible platform to produce smart eyewear to develop a small series based on their needs. Typically, eyewear takes 18 months from design to shipment. 3D printing reduces that cycle.
“With its speed, flexibility and digital DNA, 3D printing offers eyewear brands a competitive edge by allowing them to drastically reduce their time-to-market while meeting customers’ aesthetic requirements,” says Fried Vancraen, CEO of Materialise. “We believe that collaboration with Vuzix will bring new innovations to industrial smart eyewear and accelerate the customer adoption of smart eyewear in the enterprise and broader consumer markets.”
In its most recent quarter, ended March 31, Vuzix reported record smart glasses sales, up 67 percent compared with the year before. Total sales rose to $4.2 million from $2.5 million in the first quarter of 2022. The company posted a net loss of $10.2 million, versus $10.5 million a year earlier.
Vuzix stock (Nasdaq: VUZI) closed Wednesday at $5 a share, toward the lower end of its 52-week range of $3.27 to $10.49 and down roughly 85 percent from its peak of more than $32 a share in April 2021.
Smriti Jacob is Rochester Beacon managing editor. The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. Submissions to the Letters page should be sent to [email protected].
Man…..I have to tell you that I am so thankful that I am in the last quarter of my time on this planet. Technology is out of control or in control of a few. I constantly hear that all this technology improves our everyday life. Tell me all about it when I call up my pharmacy and get the “listen carefully because our numbers have changed.” Then get medicine denied and now I call up the healthcare organization. By the time we concluded and finally got our approval to pick it up….hours had passed. Not minutes…..hours. For some reason we think that the computer is the end all to customer service, etc. Interacting with a human voice is faster for many applications and keeps the blood from boiling. AI and the like will bring on more misery than benefits. The misery comes into play when those hell bent on making one life miserable get control of the technology. As we speak my wife is on a marathon call for denied medication. A simple solution controlled by a overly complex system.