Amazon is developing smart eyeglasses for its delivery drivers to guide them to, around and within buildings. Such directions could shave valuable seconds off each delivery by providing left or right directions off elevators and around obstacles such as gates or aggressive dogs.

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Amazon is reportedly developing smart glasses for its delivery drivers, according to sources who spoke to Reuters. These glasses are intended to cut “seconds” from each delivery because, well, productivity or whatever. Sources say that they are an extension of the pre-existing Echo Frames smart glasses and are known by the internal code Amelia.

These seconds will be shaved off in a couple of ways. First of all, the glasses reportedly include an embedded display to guide delivery drivers around and within buildings. They will allegedly also provide drivers with “turn-by-turn navigation” instructions while driving. Finally, wearing AR glasses means that drivers won’t have to carry a handheld GPS device. You know what that means. They’ll be able to carry more packages at once. It’s a real mitzvah.

I’m being snarky, and for good reason, but there could be some actual benefit here. I’ve been a delivery driver before and often the biggest time-sink is wandering around labyrinthine building complexes like a lost puppy. I wouldn’t have minded a device that told me where the elevator was. However, I would not have liked being forced to wear cumbersome AR glasses to make that happen.

To that end, the sources tell Reuters that this project is not an absolute certainty. The glasses could be shelved if they don’t live up to the initial promise or if they’re too expensive to manufacture. Even if things go smoothly, it’ll likely be years before Amazon drivers are mandated to wear the glasses. The company is reportedly having trouble integrating a battery that can last a full eight-hour shift and settling on a design that doesn’t cause fatigue during use. There’s also the matter of collecting all of that building and neighborhood data, which is no small feat.

Amazon told Reuters that it is “continuously innovating to create an even safer and better delivery experience for drivers” but refused to comment on the existence of these AR glasses. "We otherwise don’t comment on our product roadmap,” a spokesperson said.

The Echo Frames have turned out to be a pretty big misfire for Amazon. The same report indicates that the company has sold only 10,000 units since the third-gen glasses came out last year.

Baidu, which is often called China's answer to Google, has launched its own pair of AI-powered smart glasses at its annual World Conference event in Shanghai. The device will run on the company's ERNIE generative AI technology and was designed to "become a private assistant," according to the Financial Times. Users will reportedly be able to interact with the device using their voice and ask it questions about what it sees in their current environment. They can also tell it to play music and even track their calories consumption. And since the glasses are equipped with cameras, they can ask it to snap photos or take videos. 

When the glasses start shipping sometime next year, they could become the Chinese consumers' alternative to Meta's and Snap's devices. Meta teamed up with Ray Ban a few years ago to release a pair of smart sunglasses that can livestream and send photos hands-free. Its latest model comes built-in with Meta's generative AI assistant that users can talk to. However, the company's device isn't officially sold in China, because its servers are blocked in the country. Baidu has yet to announce how much its glasses would cost, but Meta is selling its device for $299. 

The Baidu World Conference had a huge focus on the company's AI efforts, as it takes steps to make sure ERNIE can keep up with its competitors' technologies. It also launched a new AI image generator called iRAG that apparently experiences fewer hallucinations than its predecessor, along with a tool that enables people to create software programs even if they don't have coding expertise. According to The Times, ByteDance's Doubao is now the leading AI chatbot in China based on monthly active users as observed by Sensor Tower. ByteDance is also growing its hardware offerings and recently launched a pair of earbuds with access to its AI assistant Doubao. 

A team at the University of Technology Sydney has developed an assistive technology for blind people and those with low vision. The system consists of glasses that can view their surroundings through an on-board camera, appraise the objects nearby using computer vision technology, and then play a sound that provides a cue for the wearer […]

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Amazon is developing smart eyeglasses aimed at enhancing the efficiency of its delivery drivers during the final stage of package deliveries. These glasses, still under development, will feature a small screen to provide turn-by-turn navigation. This innovation is intended to guide

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I often use surfing as a metaphor for new technology. Go too early and you don't catch the wave. Go too late and you don't catch it either. Similarly next generation hardware or software may be too early for its time. I found myself wondering if this was the case for Google Glass and AI.

For those who don't remember, Google Glass was an early augmented reality headset that despite early excitement was ultimately shuttered. I spent time with the developer version of Google Glass in 2013 and, while promising, didn't think it was ready. But the technical capabilities of the device were impressive especially for its time. Glass featured:

• a camera for taking photos and video
• a microphone for accepting voice commands
• a speaker for audio input only you could hear (bone conduction)
• a mini projector to display information and interface controls in the corner of your field of vision
• a trackpad for controlling the interface and voice commands
• a number of sensors for capturing and reacting to device movement, like head gestures
• WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity

What Google Glass didn't have is AI. That is, vision and language models that can parse and react to audio and video from the real World. As I illustrated in a look at early examples of multi-modal personal assistants: faced with a rat's nest of signs, you want to know if it's ok to park your car. A multi-modal assistant could take an image (live camera feed or still photo), a voice command (in natural language), and possibly some additional context (time, location, historical data) as input and assemble a response (or action) that considers all these factors.

Google Glass had a lot of the technical capabilities (except for processing power) to make this possible in a lightweight form factor. Maybe it just missed the AI wave.

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