Smart Glasses & XR

Yes, and it is genuinely good. Phones, earbuds and some glasses translate spoken conversation with a second or two of lag across major language pairs. It is excellent for travel and everyday chat, and still risky for legal, medical or contractual conversations.

Yes for everyday objects, landmarks, menus and text. Consumer camera glasses answer 'what am I looking at?' surprisingly well. Precision tasks — identifying a specific component, a mushroom, a medication or a face — are either unreliable, restricted or both.

For travel and single-user focus work, yes. Display glasses give you a large virtual screen from a laptop or phone, and headsets do multi-window work convincingly. Comfort over a full day, text sharpness and price still stop most people ditching a desk monitor.

You can send a note-taker; you cannot credibly send a stand-in. AI meeting assistants join, transcribe, summarise and assign actions extremely well. Photorealistic avatars that speak for you exist, but participating convincingly in live discussion is beyond them — and socially fraught.

For simple, well-lit, well-known tasks, they can help. Camera-plus-assistant glasses will identify what you're looking at, translate a sign or talk you through a recipe. Step-by-step guidance through unfamiliar physical work — repairs, wiring, anything with consequences — still lags and misreads too often to trust.