Vonder smart glasses take a different route to the growing wearables market, offering audio and microphone support without any onboard cameras. The prototypes are lightweight, sit comfortably on the face and look like ordinary spectacles. Rather than filming the world around you, they are designed to listen, and they can distinguish between your own voice and the voices of others.
Vonder was founded by executives from display glasses maker Viture, alongside chief brand officer Guillaume Hamon. The new frames are priced between roughly £235 and £315, fit a wide range of eye prescriptions and require a monthly paid AI subscription to function fully. The launch arrives in the same period that Meta introduced its own camera-free audio glasses, though Meta has not yet entered the memory-recording audio space.
Bone conduction and privacy controls
The frames carry no displays, relying instead on extended battery life and a distinctive approach to audio. Bone conduction microphones built into the arms can pick up your own voice, even at a whisper, and help differentiate between your speech and that of anyone you are talking to. This allows the glasses to operate in two modes: recording only your own voice for memos and personal notes, or capturing a conversation with others.
Privacy signals are built in. In conversation mode, a small side LED light switches on after you press a recording button on the arm. In personal modes, no light appears. An onboard array of microphones can listen to conversations and summarise them using AI, with the results appearing in a phone app or a web app. The glasses do not keep any audio recordings themselves.
A subscription-based memory assistant
The concept centres on reducing cognitive load, with Vonder positioned as a kind of second memory. “The idea of Vonder is fashion-forward glasses that allow you to basically reduce your cognitive load and rely on Vonder as a second memory, almost, so you can stay in the flow of your life, your conversations and rely on Vonder to keep track of what matters,” Hamon said.
The memory assistant builds what the company describes as a memory graph, a mind map of related memories that is stored in the cloud and viewable through the web app. The glasses are not intended to replace a phone. “It’s utopic, I think, at this current stage, to ask people to ditch the phone,” said David Jiang, Viture’s CEO and co-founder. His other company, Viture, uses display-enabled glasses as phone accessories rather than self-contained face computers.
The approach places Vonder alongside wider industry moves into audio-based AI wearables. Apple is preparing something comparable on its Apple Watch and iPhone models later in the year via Siri Recap, which similarly focuses on summarising audio rather than storing lengthy recordings.
