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We got our first close look at Google's smart glasses software, and it hints at big things
7 hours ago
- Android XR is about to take off, and Google’s been preparing three types of smart glasses, for launch over the next couple years.
- As it gets ready for that hardware, we’re taking a look at the companion software that will exist on the phone side.
- Features in development include an audio-only mode, conversation detection to mute notifications, and privacy-protecting camera tools.
At CES this year, smart glasses were everywhere, and if you haven’t tried a pair on yet, you’ll probably have the chance to soon. But for all the great progress we’re seeing across all things XR, we’re easily most excited about what’s coming next from Google. As we get ready to experience all the flavors of Google’s latest attempt at making smart glasses work, we’re getting an early peek at the software that may make this all possible.
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Over on Reddit’s Google Glass sub, user Oguie13 reports that when using the Android Studio preview release with the API set to Canary preview and installing a system image, they’re able to extract a Glasses companion app. This appears to be the same software we see in Google’s support documentation.
We got our hands on this APK, with the package name com.google.android.glasses.companion, and while we can’t yet complete the app’s setup process without actual Glasses hardware, we are able to get a bit of a preview of what to expect.
Some of this imagery matches what Google already exposed in its documentation, while other screens appear to have been updated, like those pairing instructions.
As we noted, however, for the moment we’re limited by how much of the app we’re able to interact with. That said, even if we can’t complete setup, we can still peek under the hood at some of the text strings in this app to get a sense for what Google plans to do with it.
<string name="conversation_detection_setup_title">Silence notifications during conversations</string>
<string name="conversation_detection_setup_description">"Gemini will automatically silence spoken notifications when you're talking."</string>
<string name="conversation_detection_setup_info">To protect your privacy, all conversation detection processing happens on your glasses. No raw audio, images, or conversation data is shared with Google or other services.</string>
<string name="enable_context_aware_notifications">Conversation detection</string>
<string name="enable_context_aware_notifications_description">"Pause notifications when the glasses detect you're in a conversation."</string>
<string name="enable_context_aware_notifications_description_audio_glasses">"Pause spoken notifications when the glasses detect you're in a conversation."</string>
A whole bunch of those strings make reference to how these wearables are going to handle the sort of ever-present distractions many of us are likely to face, trying to gracefully dip out and let you finish a conversation without the constant ping of notifications.
Or here, it looks like there will also be some options for manually silencing those:
<string name="pause_announcement_duration_setting_title">Pause announcements</string>
<string name="pause_announcement_settings_description">Temporarily pause spoken notifications from being read aloud.</string>We haven’t been able to surface the full UI just yet, but there’s evidence that Google could give us options to pause things for 1, 2, 4, or 8 hours.
<string name="hardware_ineligible_desc">Your glasses are not eligible to use Gemini. New glasses required to resolve.</string>
<string name="hardware_ineligible_title">Gemini features may be limited</string>Just like phones today, not all smart glasses will be created alike, and Google appears ready to limit Gemini functionality to hardware capable of handling it the best.
<string name="settings_displayless_mode_description">Turns off the glasses display</string>
<string name="settings_displayless_mode_title">Audio-only mode</string>
<string name="settings_brightness_slider_content_description">Brightness Slider</string>
<string name="settings_brightness_title">Brightness</string>We’ve known that Google is working on audio-only smart glasses first, but even when display-equipped models arrive, it sounds like users will have the option to fall back to a pure audio experience.
<string name="video_resolution_title">Video resolution</string>
<string name="video_resolution_option_1080p">1080P</string>
<string name="video_resolution_option_3k">3K (experimental)</string>Finally, we have what appear to be some camera options, recording videos at resolutions up to 3K — albeit, maybe not on all devices, by the look of that “experimental” label. There’s even evidence of a system in place to prevent you from filming while blocking the “recording” LED:
All together, that makes for a nice little preview of what we can hope to expect from Android’s smart glasses support — not a ton of detail just yet, but enough broad strokes to give us some general impressions of where Google’s priorities lie.
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