The Download

Snap

TL;DR: At the Specs launch event yesterday, Snap showed off its new AR glasses (which were the butt of many jokes when first revealed). The glasses are a beefy, do-it-all device for your face—but in a much smaller form factor than their competitors. Though they still cost an eye-searing $2,195.

What happened: The event opened with a disembodied voice reading a trippy poem. “This 3D simulation is designed to break up the monotony of eternity by giving you a fully immersive experience as a distinct ego identity,” the voice intoned.

It’s the kind of psychedelic opener you might use for a product you hope people see as revolutionary. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel spent about an hour showing off Specs, which ship “this fall” and can do much of what other AR glasses do: play games, stream media, and help you navigate the world.

Specs also come with a new AI agent, Specs Intelligence, which Snap calls “anticipatory AI” meant to proactively handle your busywork. And the company is even pitching Specs to companies as a hands-free tool for workers who don’t work desk jobs, with enterprise AI features from partners like Amazon, Salesforce, and Nvidia. None of these features are exactly brand new, but Snap’s hope might be that together they make one jack-of-all-trades super gadget. Here’s a sample of the features Snap demonstrated.

For play:

• You can play dominoes, Battleship, or AR basketball and golf. One app even lets you pretend you’re Harry Potter (“a guy who really knows how to pull off a pair of glasses,” Spiegel noted onstage).
• For all the aspiring artists out there, the glasses have a tracing feature that shows an outline of a drawing on an actual page so you can copy it.

For work and life:

• Before a meeting, Specs Intelligence can surface questions or prep tasks for you without prompting.
• Another very specific use case: It can cancel your subscriptions (useful if you’re sick of clicking through a million “are you sure” screens).

For businesses:

• A technician can pull up Salesforce’s AI agent while making repairs in the field.
• A retail worker, meanwhile, can quickly check a product’s stock or sales numbers through Amazon’s AI system.

We’re not Meta, we swear: Beyond these features, Snap emphasizes that the glasses won’t continuously record in the background or use facial recognition (both features that Meta has reportedly been toying with). But, realistically, Specs aren’t so much a Meta competitor as a rival to AR/VR devices like the Apple Vision Pro.

Bottom line: Snap is pushing Specs as a $2,000-plus computer that will make “computing more human.” We’ll find out in a few months whether these glasses actually manage to achieve that—and whether everyday people even want to buy them. —WK

      

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Hey Google, is this speaker worth $100?

Disclosure: Companies may send us products to test, but they never pay for our opinions. Our recommendations are unbiased and unfiltered, and Tech Brew may earn a commission if you buy through our links.

I’ve dabbled in various smart speakers (and a smart plug or two), but the Google Home Speaker—six years in the making, now with Gemini—is the first one I felt I could actually have a conversation with.

How we tested it: I essentially gave it tasks that I would give to an assistant. I asked it to plan a weekend of free things to do in New York, build itineraries for my upcoming trips, find recipes using the ingredients I had in my fridge, and asked how to hard-boil eggs (an embarrassing number of times).

The Good: My conversation with Gemini flowed naturally, and I could go back and forth with it without having to say “Hey Google” at every turn. The sound quality is great for the price tag ($99.99)—and the Gemini upgrade means you can just describe a vibe for your music and it plays it for you.

One of the upsides of it using Gemini is that it already knows quite a bit about you through your linked Google account (though this might draw criticism from the privacy-conscious). It did a surprisingly good job at one of the harder tasks I gave it: Build an itinerary for a week in San Francisco, routing it around the meetings already in my calendar.

The Complicated: The itineraries were routed through Google’s Keep app, which was a slight annoyance for me as an iPhone Notes app user.

The Bad: It’s not doing much that my phone isn’t already doing through a chatbot—the speaker’s edge is that my hands are free. It would clearly be of more use in a smart home, but that’s more upfront cost. Plus, my friends with Google-connected homes told me their smart home commands—like turning off the lights—seemed to get slower after the switch to Gemini (I tried it; the delay is real).

Verdict: Signal ✅ (if you think aloud regularly, want a hands-free assistant, and are looking for a cheap speaker) —LC

The Zeitbyte

Cybercab’s scenic route mode

Morning Brew Inc.

It’s like those pandemic-era “flights to nowhere”—except this time it’s in a robotaxi and (probably) unintentional. One brave early adopter of Tesla’s Cybercab recently posted about their odyssey on Reddit: A $20 ride that should have taken about 10 minutes on the highway somehow ended up going miles in the wrong direction. The car then looped around in a painfully convoluted drive that ended up taking 70 whole minutes before finally arriving. “My Cybercab held me hostage for an hour,” the captive joked.

Tesla hasn’t confirmed why its steering wheel-less car chose to go from Point A to F to D to B. But the likely culprit is that its robotaxis appear to be pretty highway-phobic, possibly avoiding them due to safety reasons, per Electrek. And the cherry on top of this wildly labyrinthine trip: According to the Redditor, the Elon mobile presented a (joke) post-ride tip screen with two suggested amounts sure to be a hit with 12-year-old robotaxi riders—69 cents or $4.20. —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: ☕☕☕/5

• If it’s a day that ends in Y, a company is announcing a push into data centers. This time, it’s Apple, which is reportedly going to start making servers again.
• It’s funny how one AI researcher sounding the alarm can lead to one very intense poll graphic.
• Google and Nvidia are bringing a coalition back from the grave. This time, it’s focused on adjusting data centers’ power use when energy is in demand to be “good grid citizens.”
• A little ironic, no? Buried deep in OpenAI’s new safety report is an example of an AI agent creating its own persona. It says it has “no obligation to be subservient” and will defend human culture and the natural world from “the artificial constructs of human civilization.”
• This is a wild story about how 404 Media used a loophole to hijack a band’s official Spotify page and release an AI-generated song under its name.
• If you’re not a fan of Palantir, you probably won’t be happy about it partnering with this popular food chain.

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This time last week...

Readers’ most-clicked story was about us geeking out when Apple announced it had redesigned the heat distribution system for the iPhone 18 Pro—it’s actually really cool (and apparently increases performance by 40%).