Halliday's second swing at smart glasses drops the gimmick, adds $599 AI meeting assistant

I walked into my second Halliday demo bracing for another headache. The first-gen glasses I tried at CES 2025 left my eyes aching after thirty minutes, thanks to a finicky little movable display that was more optical torture device than useful screen. So when the company promised the Gen 2 was a dramatic improvement, I was ready to be disappointed.

I wasn’t. The janky pop-out window is dead and buried. In its place, Halliday has built in proper waveguides—one for each eye—that are discreet enough to pass for chunky normal glasses but far more viewable. You get a monochrome green display at 600 by 300 pixels per eye, cranked up to 1,600 nits of brightness. Inside a dark bar, the image was crisp and legible. The four-mic array handled voice commands over ambient noise without much fuss, and the company claims roughly 12 hours of battery life. That longevity comes from a deliberate omission: there’s no camera. That privacy-first choice doubles as a battery-saver and clarifies exactly who these are for.

Halliday is pitching the Gen 2 squarely at desk workers with a new feature called Meeting Flow. The glasses use AI to surface context during conversations so you don’t have to glance at your laptop. What caught my attention wasn’t the standard real-time captioning or translation across 45 languages—we’ve seen that before, often poorly executed. It was the trio of more ambitious tools: Thread Tracker maps how a meeting moves from topic to topic, Decision Confirmation logs what was actually agreed to, and Commitment Check verifies whether action items got assigned to someone with a deadline. I saw a brief demo of this, though interviewing a product manager isn’t the ideal test case for meeting-summary AI.

Here’s where I pump the brakes. I’ve tested enough AI wearables to be deeply skeptical that software can reliably intuit what matters in a fast-moving conversation or correctly extract to-do items. And at $599 before prescription lenses, the Gen 2 isn’t an impulse buy. Halliday says it can handle my -10 prescription with monster astigmatism, which would be genuinely impressive if true. The glasses are up for preorder today with a $10 deposit and a $100 discount, shipping in September. The vision is tighter this time around. Whether the AI delivers is an entirely different question.