Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of automatic meeting recordings. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show we're going to talk about wearables, specifically these wearables that are just constantly recording you. Recording your meetings, recording your conversations, in some cases recording everything you do all of the time. There's a question about what recording means, what they're doing with these recordings, where they're storing these recordings, and how we as people feel being the ones doing the recording or the ones on the other end. The Verge's V Song has been covering all of these devices, including a pair of Meta glasses that have no camera that I'm totally fascinated by. She's going to come on. We're going to try to figure out what to make of all of these new devices. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today.
I'm Travis Larch, and this is 90 seconds on The Verge for Thursday, October 15th, 2026. Pre-orders for the highly anticipated folding iPhone duo start tomorrow. But pre-orders are already happening. Apple is letting customers pick out their phone, submit their payment information, basically everything up to actually pressing the buy button, which will go live tomorrow morning. And good luck beating all of the AI agents who will also be trying to buy the phone. Speaking of AI, OpenAI promised it won't use hardware secrets it allegedly got from some of its employees who used to work at Apple. This is the latest turn in a lawsuit Apple filed against OpenAI back in July. OpenAI made this agreement shortly after a US district judge signaled that he was highly likely to grant an injunction, forcing them to do it anyway. Meanwhile, OpenAI is accusing one of their former employees of sharing confidential files with Apple. Look at it this way. The way things are headed with always-listening wearable devices, soon none of us will have secrets. Speaking of secrets, The Verge's Sean Hollister reported today on security vulnerabilities a researcher found with a cute little AI pet called Elico. The toy is made by a company called Energize Labs. And apparently it transcribed millions of conversations left completely unprotected. And it turns out the company was literally profiling its customers based on those conversations. One customer was described as having difficulty trusting family members. [music] And after this, that customer's trust issues will only continue. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Thursday, October 15th, 2026.
Okay, let's talk wearables. The Verge's V Song is here. Hi, V.
All right, we need to do this at the beginning of every time you come on the Vergecast. I need a full rundown of all of the gadgets you're currently wearing.
I have the Ray-Ban Meta Audio. I have a Dexcom G7 CGM. I have the Apple Watch Series 12. I have the Fitbit Edge. And that's like four for today.
Kind of a late day for you, honestly.
Yeah, I have my Oura ring charging at the moment, so that's why I'm not wearing that. So, you know, a four to... Yeah, I'm sure the commenters will be like, 'Oh my god, she's falling off.' But it's... I honestly, three to five is normal for me these days.
That's good. I'm glad to hear it. Well, another time I want to talk about the Fitbit Edge because it runs right into a bunch of the stuff we've been talking about in a way that I think is fascinating. But for today, there's two devices and one theme that I want to talk about, which is a thing that you've been covering a lot. And I think the place to start here is with the glasses on your face. The Ray-Ban Meta Audio, which are, as I understand, just the Meta Ray-Bans minus the camera, is essentially what Meta went to do here.
I am fascinated by the sheer fact that these glasses exist at all. That Meta is even willing to make a pair of glasses like this as it goes harder and harder into smart glasses. It is like pivoting a lot of its strategy around this as the hardware play. The fact that it is willing to make a pair of glasses without a camera at all strikes me as fascinating. What do you make of the fact that these even exist?
Well, you know, the timing is very funny, right? Because we've just had this summer of backlash against the Meta smart glasses. You know, like however you want to call them, all their various, like whether it's Meta Ray-Ban or Ray-Ban Meta, all of the camera-equipped glasses, display and on display, you know, a lot of people had big feelings about them over this last summer.
Have you noticed 'pervert glasses' as a phrase going totally mainstream, by the way? Like, at least among everyone I know, 'pervert glasses' is now just a phrase people say.
Yeah, it's the new 'glasshole.' Like, we've retired 'glasshole' and we've gone to 'pervert glasses.' And, you know, that was a big theme over the past summer. And so these glasses coming out sans camera, it feels like, haha, very convenient timing, right? Even though when I went to Connect and I talked to Alex Heml, who is their VP of wearables, he was like, 'These have been in the works for two years because that's the typical product timeline.' They said that early on, the audio capabilities, they had underestimated how much people would like just the fact that these could be a pair of discrete open-ear headphones. They had underestimated that and the fact that when you omit the camera, you open it up to a lot of different styles that can be a little less chunky, so to speak. These are particularly, you know, it doesn't have my prescription in it, otherwise it would be chunky no matter what with my prescription. These have like a wire frame on the bottom. None of the smart glasses thus far from Meta have the ability to have a wire frame in any capacity just because of how much tech needs to go into the frame itself. If you look at the temple, they're a lot thinner than the typical Meta glasses are.
Yeah, I would actually put them closer, like on the spectrum between a normal pair of glasses and the normal Meta Ray-Bans, I would put these closer to regular glasses. Like they're a huge leap forward in looking good on your face.
Exactly. And that's kind of their whole push with this particular pair of glasses is that, you know, at Connect they had said that Muse, our cute little dystopian friend Muse, is coming to all of the glasses. And that would include these, ostensibly. Right now it's not on there, but the idea is that, okay, you have people who are now very conveniently, even though that wasn't their intent, creeped out by a camera. But you can still have a very powerful AI agent embedded into it. It's more fashionable looking. It's more discreet. So, you know, you get people to interact with Muse maybe a bit more if you stuff it in a pair of glasses like these. Without the camera, it's a little bit nerfed as to what you can do with AI. Some people will be appreciative of that. There are definitely people who would be like, 'Well, why omit the camera at all? This is now a useless pair of glasses.' You know, there's points.
I categorically do not agree with the people who say it's nerfed by not having a camera. Like, A, we're at a point right now with so many of these AI tools where the visual intelligence stuff they do is not that good. And B, you have a phone. Like, the 'I need you to take a picture of something' problem is solved. We have the technology for taking a picture of something. And actually, that's a much better way to solve this problem, if you ask me, because I can point my phone at something and take a picture and I can tell you what matters by pointing my camera at it. Whereas saying we're going to have this camera on that's looking at everything all the time and we're going to figure out what's important, it doesn't work. Like, it doesn't work. And so to me, the idea of like having no camera and then when I need to take a picture, I can, I would argue is actually a better user experience for most people. Not being able to take hands-free pictures is something, and there are people who like doing that, and I think that's great. But as an AI tool, I'm not bothered at all by losing the camera here. Not at all.
Yeah, I also share in that experience. Like, the title of my review is that I did not miss the camera at all with these glasses. I will say that, like, for an accessibility use case, the people who really lose out there are, you know, the blind and low-vision community, people who don't have use of their hands or have limb differences. Those people, losing the camera, this isn't a viable option for them.
And that is a very big conversation, a totally different can of worms. This is not necessarily for those people, and they have other options. The other kind of feature that was introduced at Meta Connect, which is also still not available just yet, is FDA-cleared hearing assistance. So when you think about these in that perspective, if you're someone with mild to moderate hearing loss, you pay upfront for, I think it's an additional $150 fee. It comes to the glasses through software, and then these are kind of a discrete pair of hearing assistants, hearing over-the-counter hearing aid type situation, which, you know, a lot of people I talk to in this industry are very aware of the stigma that comes with hearing aids. And even something like a pair of AirPods that have that same functionality, a pair of glasses, if you're wearing them, it reduces the stigma quite a bit for that kind of use case. And so that's why there's a lot of interest in this type of open-ear headphone solution for that particular accessibility use case. None of this like solves the major problem that a lot of people have with smart glasses. Like, I think the whole removing the camera, like walking out and about in these glasses, I was like, I feel a lot more relaxed. I'm not worried.
Did you actually? I was wondering about this because I know you've struggled with how you feel testing these things out in public around other people, and if you feel like you're obligated to tell everyone everything you have that's recording every time you sit down at a table. Like, did you notice the difference having these glasses versus the other ones?
Yeah, because like, there's no... it's a little hard to accidentally start recording with the camera glasses, but I've done it. It can be done. It happens sometimes. And you don't always know that's happening. I've had it happen. I've been in conversation with other people who've had that happen and watch it, and then you have to be like, 'Oh, are you recording me right now? This is an awkward conversation.' Um, you know, there's no worrying on my part about having to disclose that because I actually disabled the wake word. So if I say the wake word for these, it's not going to do anything. There's an action button here. So, one, I hate saying the wake word out in public. I feel very lame doing that. So actually just programming this action button to summon the AI for me. There's no ambient listening going on until I trigger it, and then it's either going to be the AI only listening to me for my query, or if I'm activating some sort of translation feature, the way that this translation feature works now, I would have to basically inform the person, 'Hello, these are translating for me.' You're disclosing that it's not necessarily one of those always-listening, 'I'm recording every conversation you have' type of feature. Although understandably, I think a lot of people in the public would still view this as a sort of surveillance tech because they think, 'Oh, it's always ambiently listening.' You can disable that. I disabled that. Other people wouldn't know, per se, but I know. I know, and I feel better about that. And, you know, my hair kind of covers the temples. I know I'm not being a creep, and so my worry about getting punched goes infinitely down. Like, it is kind of weird because I go out now and I'm like, I'm not going to be a jerk. I don't record people out in public, and if I do, I disclose it. But I feel like a paranoid person because I'll go out testing these glasses and I'll think to myself, okay, well, when I'm in public, what I'm going to do in a testing scenario is I'm going to take the toggle that's inside and turn it off. And if someone asks me, 'These are...?' I will take it off and I'll show it to them, and then I'll ask them their feelings about that, and then I'll use that for my future reporting, and it's going to be okay. Which is a psychological burden to have when you have this type of device.
I don't have that with these. I feel great. Like, I don't feel like a... In the comment section, some of our readers were just like, 'You're still a pervert. You're still a creep wearing these.' And I would gently say, 'No, I'm not,' because again, I have disabled the wake word. It's not ambiently listening to anybody, and I can't record any footage of you. There's no transcripts being generated. I feel great. I can just listen to my podcasts and my music when I'm out on my daily walks. And that's generally the basic function of this because the AI model that is on here, Muse Spark, it's a little dumb.
Yeah, it's less dumb than before, but still kind of dumb.
It is very funny to me that we're going to back our way into what I think was a good idea the first time. Like, this idea of audio glasses, which let you take calls and listen to music on your glasses, is not new and it's not an AI idea, but it didn't work before and it didn't really get any kind of marketing muscle or excitement behind it. But like the Bose Frames...
I mean, that was a long time ago now that those were out.
It was like seven years. Yeah.
And it's very funny that we're going to sort of overshoot with what these glasses could be, and then the whole industry is going to sort of slowly back its way up back to that seven-year-old idea, which I think was a good idea the whole time. It's going to be really interesting to see all of that. It's like hybrid cars, right? Like everybody, we way overshot, and then everybody's going to come back and be like, 'Oh, actually the middle ground here is kind of nice. Let's linger there for a little while.'
Yeah, no, that's like a really good analogy because I loved the Bose Frames when they first came out. I was like, at the time, my headline there was like, 'I was so ready to dunk on these, but actually I kind of love them.' [laughter] And it was surprising how much I loved them because I'm someone who goes out and I walk a lot. And if you are someone who walks a lot, you want... I use this example every single time I come on here. [gasps] North Jersey drivers, maniacs, maniacs, all of them. And I really need that situational awareness while I'm out and about. I wouldn't say these are great if you're just like in the office listening to your tunes. The sound leakage is real. If you're on the subway, sorry, you still need your AirPods. It's not going to work on a subway. But if you're just out and about walking, trying to get your steps in like many of us are, and you just kind of want to listen to stuff while you're on the go, but still engage with your surroundings. If you're at home, I love being at home and using these while I'm listening to an audiobook or a podcast because I can still hear my spouse when they want my attention. If my cat is like yowling at the moon because he's hungry, I'll know and he won't like knock over from the table. It's great. It is like... I have this problem at home where my spouse and I are always listening to stuff. So we have our AirPods in, and then we'll be screaming for each other because we're in a very vertical house, and we're like, 'Hey, can you hear me? Can you hear me?' And we'll be running up and down floors. I don't have that problem if they want my attention and I have this on. It's actually quite great.
