Halliday is not chasing the camera race this time. The second-generation Halliday G2 puts its pitch on the conference table: captions, translation, to-dos and decision prompts appear above the lenses, while the camera has been removed entirely.
The glasses were announced on July 21 at $599. Customers can reserve a pair with a $10 deposit and receive a $100 credit toward the final purchase, with the first batch scheduled to ship in September 2026. What Halliday is trying to sell is not a phone worn on the face. It is closer to a prompt screen that becomes visible only when someone looks up in a meeting.
No video capture, just meeting audio
The core feature of Halliday G2 is called Meeting Flow. During a meeting, it can provide real-time captions, translation across more than 45 languages, quick search, topic tracking, decision confirmation and commitment checks. After the meeting, transcripts and summaries are sent to the companion app.
QbitAI framed the move as a shift from recording meetings to assisting them in real time. The Verge's hands-on report gave more concrete examples: Thread Tracker can show how a discussion moves from budget and staffing to schedule; Decision Confirmation pulls out conclusions that have already formed; Commitment Check looks for action items, owners and deadlines.
That is a much narrower ambition than replacing the phone with AI glasses, but it is also easier to test. The common problems in meetings are not usually that no device is filming the room. They are mishearing, missing notes and forgetting who agreed to what. Halliday narrows the problem to text and audio, avoiding camera permissions while putting the product's fate on speech recognition, meeting understanding and the accuracy of its prompts.
The privacy pressure remains
Removing the camera is the clearest point of differentiation for Halliday G2. WIRED noted that camera-equipped glasses such as Meta Ray-Ban have already triggered concerns about covert recording. Even Realities also emphasized a camera-free design in its previous-generation product. Halliday is now joining that camp, with target users including founders, executives, consultants, product managers and team leads.
But no camera does not mean no privacy debate. G2 still relies on microphones to capture meeting audio, and WIRED observed that it has no indicator light to tell people nearby that recording is underway. A Halliday media contact told WIRED:
"The user should disclose to the room that the recording is in progress, as it is required by any other recording device."
That answer pushes the boundary back to the wearer. For corporate meetings, removing the camera solves only half the issue. The other half is consent for recording, access rights to meeting materials and how transcripts are stored. If a company lets employees wear this kind of device into meeting rooms, IT and legal teams will look beyond hardware specs. They will care about recording notices, data retention, attendee awareness and export controls.
The display finally behaves like a display
The first Halliday glasses had a rougher experience. The Verge's Victoria Song recalled that during a CES 2025 demo, the previous small display window was hard to align and left her eyes sore after a half-hour presentation. G2 switches to a more conventional binocular waveguide design, with a separate display for each eye.
The hardware story is also clearer. Each eye gets 600 x 300 resolution and peak brightness of 1,600 nits. A four-microphone array is built into the frame; QbitAI said it can pick up speech from about two meters away and distinguish the wearer from other speakers. The Verge tested the glasses in a noisy bar, where the four-mic array was still able to receive commands. Halliday told The Verge that typical battery life is about 12 hours.
Those specs do not turn the product into an AR headset. The display sits near the top of the field of view, meant for quick glances while preserving face-to-face eye contact. For images, navigation or complex interfaces, a phone or computer is still the better device. G2 is betting on the few seconds in a meeting when someone looks up to confirm a point.
The price also pushes it toward professional users. The $599 price does not include any added cost for prescription lenses. WIRED also noted that the AI service has a free tier and paid subscriptions from $10 to $99, with the free tier offering 120 minutes of recording. This is unlikely to become an impulse-buy consumer gadget; it looks more like a trial product for people who spend a lot of time in meetings.
Chinese hardware makers face the same question
Over the past few months, the AI hardware story has clearly split into different directions. OASIS rings are betting on quiet voice input, Moonix glasses on long-term recording and lightweight wear, and Halliday G2 on in-meeting information prompts. None of them makes model parameters the main character. The competition is moving to the entry point: when people cannot conveniently pull out a phone or type on a keyboard, how do they hand intent and context to AI?
Halliday's fresher move is turning camera-free design from a defensive privacy talking point into the product's positioning. That is especially realistic in Chinese office settings. Many companies are not opposed to meeting-minutes tools, but they are highly sensitive to cameras, external recording and cloud transcription. If camera-free glasses are to enter meeting rooms, the next step is a clear set of compliance controls: how recording status is shown, who can see transcripts, how long content is kept and whether companies can manage the system centrally.
Three things are worth watching after the first shipments in September: whether users keep Meeting Flow turned on, whether the AI can reliably distinguish decisions, owners and deadlines, and whether enterprise customers accept a form factor without a recording indicator light. If those tests fail, G2 will be a better-specified meeting toy. If they work, camera-free AI glasses could move from a privacy compromise to a more practical route for office hardware.
Sources: QbitAI, The Verge, WIRED, CocoLoop, and public materials from Halliday; details checked include the launch timing, $599 price, $10 deposit, $100 preorder credit, 600 x 300 per-eye resolution, 1,600-nit brightness, 45-language support, 12-hour battery-life figure, recording-disclosure wording and September shipping plan.