Paul Jones / Android Authority
TL;DR
- 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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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.
Code
Silence notifications during conversations
"Gemini will automatically silence spoken notifications when you're talking."
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.
Conversation detection
"Pause notifications when the glasses detect you're in a conversation."
"Pause spoken notifications when the glasses detect you're in a conversation."
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:
Code
Pause announcements
Temporarily pause spoken notifications from being read aloud.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.
Code
Your glasses are not eligible to use Gemini. New glasses required to resolve.
Gemini features may be limitedJust 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.
Code
Turns off the glasses display
Audio-only mode
Brightness Slider
BrightnessWe’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.
Code
Video resolution
1080P
3K (experimental)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.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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