00:00Tech's biggest companies want to replace your smartphone.
00:03But the very features that make a new wave of AI devices useful is also making everyone
00:08around them uncomfortable.
00:09Unlike smartphones, AI devices can hear, see, and respond to the world around you.
00:15But they only get more useful as they capture more footage.
00:18That has sparked concerns because that includes shooting footage and recording audio of people
00:24who never consented to be in them.
00:25The backlash has been strongest against Meta's Ray-Bans, an early reader in the category
00:31that combines SLR Luxottica's trendy and fashionable designs with Meta's AI technology.
00:36These glasses, which sold nearly 7 million units last year, have attracted attention globally.
00:43UK's biggest pub chain, Wetherspoon, has banned them over concerns that they could be used
00:48to record people without their consent.
00:50Meta also faces a class-action lawsuit in California, alleging that it violated the very popular
00:55privacy protections that it promised to users.
00:58Meta has denied the allegations.
01:01It says that it has designed these glasses for privacy.
01:04In response, several companies are exploring different form factors from pins, to pendants,
01:10to glasses, as well as recorders that magnetically attach to the back of your phone.
01:15OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company is working on several AI devices, said one possible solution
01:21could be on-device AI processing.
01:24Altman said that as these devices get more useful, they will have to capture more and more data.
01:30But people who are using these devices 24 hours a day would not be comfortable sending all of that to
01:35the cloud.
01:35Instead, if the data was processed on-device, that is likely to be a solution to the privacy concerns.
01:41But that future is likely a few years away, because the devices that we have today do not have the
01:47computing power to process this data.
01:50Analysts are not sure if this would be enough.
01:52Glasses that do not have cameras still record audios of people who might not have consented to being in that
01:59footage.
01:59There are also concerns about how long this data is stored with companies, who holds access to them, and when
02:06it is eventually scrapped.
02:09When smartphones first came out nearly two decades ago, people had similar fears about their ability to shoot audio and
02:15video.
02:16Jitesh Ubrani, director at IDC, told Reuters that the concern that people have is not that they do not want
02:23to be recorded entirely.
02:24Rather, they want to have consent and control over who records them and when.
02:28That's the question that AI companies will have to solve as they look for a killer device.
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