Do Smart Glasses Make Cooking Easier? Here Are My Takeaways After Real World Testing
Smart glasses they have received both praise and skepticism from the public and technology insiders alike. CNET’s Scott Stein, who has covered the category for a decade, agrees that it still feels “weird and new.”
I shared the same push and pull of excitement and doubt. But given how much time I spend with myself smart home technology and kitchen items, it was only a matter of time before curiosity got the better of me and I brought a pair into the kitchen.
As an experienced home cook with an eye for useful technology, cooking with smart glasses has always piqued my interest. It’s one of the ways smart glass manufacturers, including Meta and Solos, have marketed their connected frames, so I thought I’d give this new cookware a try.
For this test, I used a sample pair of Solos AirGo A5 Hydro 8 noise glasses, complete with prescription lenses, as I am helpless without corrective eyewear. I approached this smart glass cooking challenge from three angles:
- Basic cooking tips, such as food science and mystery product identification.
- Cooking a well-known recipe in a cookbook and finding the right dishes to complete the meal.
- Learning a new recipe and testing it against a targeted online source.
Here’s how it went.
About Solos AirGo A5
Solos provided a sample pair with a prescription similar to this one for my regular glasses.
Before I jump into each task, I’d like to discuss the smart glasses I’ve used and their capabilities. For this challenge, I used the Solos AirGo A5 smart glassescomes with a companion app that acts as an AI chatbot. The model I used doesn’t have a built-in display or camera; instead, it relies on the Solos app for those tasks.
At first, I planned to use automatic chatbot commands, but at one point it refused to help with cooking. Instead, I used it Google Gemini to create chatbot instructions for cooking — with some flexibility to answer other questions. (While I have some experience with AI chatbot programming, putting proper instructions into the character limit is a tall order for a verbose writer like me.)
Unfortunately, the Solos prescription wears off in my left eye, so I can’t wear glasses while working on my computer. Thankfully, the difference wasn’t a problem when cooking.
Solos has several options for chatbots: GPT-4o Mini (Azure or OpenAI), Claude 3 Haiku, and Gemini 2.0 Flash. (I settled on the Gemini bot because it’s the platform I’m most familiar with.) This means that my testing is more about cooking with AI than smart glasses — Solos (or any other product with similar features) is simply a tool to talk to a chatbot.
I found the voice integration in the Solos app to be a bit robotic — at least compared to the Gemini or ChatGPT. Still, it was easy to understand. Similarly, I appreciate having the option to adjust the speed, tone, and length of the response, although the tone didn’t seem to affect the voice quality too much in my experience.
Speaking of sound, Solos uses small speakers on the temples (arms) of the frame, but they are not headphones. This means that other people around you can also hear them when the volume is high. Solos has other features, such as live translation and fitness tracking, but these were not relevant in this test.
1. Basic cooking tips, conversions and identifying ingredients: Useful, but not stable
The cooking advice used to be accurate but it’s best to double check your sources before taking anything at face value.
I didn’t get any deals on the basic cooking advice I asked for during my testing. Smart glasses responded with helpful tips when I asked about it boiling eggs or decorative options. It worked well for changing measurements, like asking how many teaspoons are in 1/3 cup. Likewise, it helped me accurately convert a cup of cheese to grams, which accounts for volume and quantity.
After finding a quick and easy vinaigrette recipe, I followed up with a question about why acidic foods taste as good as they do. Although the information about acidity was useful and accurate, the discussion model created article titles and links when I asked for sources to support its claims. This is a great first comment to see with the eyes of the flesh of examination.
Next, I took a photo of the squash in my kitchen for reference. It did well with delicata squash, but had trouble with a larger squash that I later discovered was stridetti. At one point, he even told me that squash is a Korean melon, which was not true.
The last test in this section asked me to triple the recipe shown in the picture of the cookbook, but it only worked if I specifically said, “I want to triple the size of this recipe.” Still, it was reliable enough for a few recipes I tried, including one with only four ingredients (alfredo sauce) and one with 11 (lasagna).
2. Cooking with a known recipe: Reliable, but quirky
Despite a few drawbacks, I believe that the help with existing recipes is the best proof that smart glasses have a place in the kitchen.
The biggest success of the experiment was the ability to take a photo of my cookbook and have the glasses take me to the recipe.
I chose a simple Alfredo sauce from The Magician’s Cookbook: Bridal Editionwhich I do at least once a month. The smart glasses not only accurately captured all the ingredients and instructions, but they also helped me manage three recipes at once to get the perfect meal. For example, I started with the sauce before moving on to chicken thighs and a simple side salad.
Switching between recipes was easy, usually involving a quick statement like “I’m ready for the next chicken step” or “the sauce is bubbling, what do I do now?”
After preparing all three parts of the meal, I asked for advice on how to polish it. This made the final presentation look much better than my usual lazy serving style.
However, I encountered two problems while cooking this dish: times and portions. Unfortunately, the AirGo A5’s smart glasses don’t support setting timers and the double-tap method to start the Gemini timer on my phone is hard to figure out — hitting a certain part of the frame felt like throwing money — it didn’t always work. Instead, I went down to my usual strategy of using the Google Nest Hub smart display in my kitchen.
As for fractions, the problem lies in text-to-speech output, which ignores the cut in phrases like “1/2 cup cream” or “3/4 cup grated parmesan cheese” altogether. The result was a voice message calling for 34 cups of cheese. Wow. (In case you’re curious, scaling the entire recipe to include 34 cups of cheese will create more than 181 servings.)
3. Learning a new recipe and testing it using an internet source: Failure
Admirable for Solos, the first time he linked to Dash of Jazz was the first recipe, even if it revealed details and links in later messages.
Things went wrong when I asked about learning a new recipe. I practiced jollof rice — a classic Nigerian dish that I love but have never cooked — and it “provided” a list of ingredients attributed to Dash of Jazz:
“Based on the Dash of Jazz Nigerian Jollof Rice recipe, you will need the following ingredients: long grain rice, tomatoes, tomato paste, red pepper, scotch bonnet pepper (adjust to your liking with spices), onion, garlic, ginger, curry powder, thyme, bay leaves, bouillon cubes, vegetable oil and salt.”
Let’s dig into this ingredient list to see where it goes wrong. The most notable inclusions are garlic and ginger, which are not part of the original recipe. Similarly, it leaves tomato sauce and powdered white pepper on the list.
Because the whole purpose of the experiment was to follow the instructions on the glasses, I stopped by the store to pick up the ingredients I didn’t have. When I followed Solos to find the required amount of the recipe, he continued to suggest garlic, while also adding cayenne pepper and smoked paprika to the list of ingredients that were not in the original recipe.
Upon further investigation, the tracking recipe and price are not the same as jollof rice — and are AI ideas. Luckily, I had plenty of ingredients on hand, so the only thing I bought when I went grocery shopping was fresh ginger that cost 56 cents.
The conclusion
I might change my tune to smart glasses with a built-in display but still, I’d rather stick with regular prescription glasses instead of an expensive gadget.
Cooking with smart glasses may be a good idea to follow recipes, but it is not good to discover new recipes or recipes. This is mostly from relying on AI chatbots — unless you’re willing to dig deep for supporting sources.
As for the Solos AirGo A5, I like the glasses and the idea of quick access to a a chatbot with simple things. The directional speakers are reasonably good, and having multiple chatbot models is a nice bonus. However, tapping the controls on the device moves the frame enough to give me motion sickness. (Voice controls are a decent option.) While the $250 price tag is affordable for smart glasses, the audio-only functionality may turn some people off.
In the end, I prefer to use separate glasses, earbuds and the Gemini app for the same operation.
