Seleste Smart Glasses Review

Hardware

The Seleste glasses feel similar to regular sunglasses, except that the arms are thicker to hold the electronics, and there is a small camera right between the eyes. There are also two buttons on the right arm, and a touchpad on the right arm near the hinge. Both arms have a wide and thick part near the front, and a significantly narrower part resting above your ears that curves at the end. In addition, there's a speaker built in to the right arm. The glasses come with a protective case, and they charge through a micro USB port on the right arm. When I asked some sighted people what they look like, they said they look like regular sunglasses, and the camera is only noticeable if they look more closely. They said that the glasses don't look odd at all, and its not obvious that they're smart glasses.

Setup Process and Connection

After Seleste shipped the glasses, they emailed me a link to enroll in the TestFlight beta for the Seleste app. Currently they only support iOS and not Android, but hopefully that will be coming soon. The setup process is pretty easy; after you create an account, the app will ask you to turn on the glasses by holding down the bottom button, the button farthest from the front. After that, the app will automatically find and connect to them over Bluetooth, and then it will ask you to connect the glasses to WiFi. If you are at home, you can enter the details for your home network, or if not, you can turn on your phone's hotspot and enter the details for that. The app can store multiple WiFi networks, and when you start the app again, the glasses will usually automatically connect to either your home network or your hotspot depending on where you are. When you use the hotspot, you need to make sure "Maximize compatibility" is turned on in the settings for "Personal hotspot" so it will create a 2.4 GHZ network instead of a 5 GHZ network, since the glasses only support 2.4 GHZ. I think you also need to have the "Personal hotspot" settings page open while the glasses connect. To turn off the glasses, you hold the bottom button down until you hear the sound, and pressing that button will speak the remaining battery percentage.

Features

Right now, the app has three main features: text scanning, scene description, and the smart assistant. Text scanning can be triggered by pressing the top button on the glasses once, or by activating a button in the app. It will read any text that the camera sees, although right now it takes a few seconds for it to process. I think the way it works is it takes a picture, processes it, reads the text, and then repeats. There is no way to save the text, but you can review the result with VoiceOver. Scene description can be triggered by pressing the top button twice quickly, or from the app, and it will take a picture and send it to an AI based on GPT-4 and then speak the description. It only takes about 5 seconds now, and the descriptions are extremely detailed and accurate, just like the descriptions from Be My AI. The smart assistant can be triggered by saying "Ella" or "Sam", depending on the assistant name you set, and then speaking your question; or, you can type your question into the app. The assistant can answer questions about what the camera sees, and it will also remember previous images and let you ask about them too. It can also take pictures repeatedly, for example if you ask it to find something you've dropped, or to describe people passing by. They have also developed a Gmail integration, although it has not been released to the public yet.

There are two options for the voice. It can either play through the speaker on the glasses, or through the phone. However, the voice from the glasses is very robotic, and people around you will be able to hear it easily. If you choose the phone, it will use an OpenAI voice, which is a lot better, and you can also change the speech rate, which is very helpful for listening to the long AI descriptions faster. You can also use headphones, and I have tried the Shokz OpenRun Pro, Shokz OpenFit, Sony LinkBuds, and AirPods Pro 2, all of which can fit on my head along with the glasses. I sometimes even wear the OpenRun Pro and OpenFit at the same time when away from home, so I can hear both my phone and my Android watch, and the glasses still fit. My ears sometimes start hurting a little after a few hours, but its not too bad. However, sometimes when I'm around traffic, or my environment is louder for some other reason, the voice can be hard to hear, especially at higher speeds. Hopefully they will allow you to increase the volume of the voice in the future, since it is quieter than VoiceOver right now.

I would estimate the battery life to be about 8 hours, and the glasses seem to charge pretty quickly.

Flaws

Right now, you cannot use the glasses with other apps such as OKO or Seeing AI, or use them for video calling, including Aira, and part of this is because of Apple's limitations on what iOS apps can do. However, the company plans to allow third-party apps to interface with the glasses in the future. Sometimes the glasses will lose connection with my hotspot, making me have to restart the glasses and reconnect, although this happens less often now. Also, sometimes I have to turn Bluetooth off and back on before the glasses will connect, and this could be because I usually have around 4 devices already connected to my phone. The reason the glasses need to connect to WiFi is that the app retrieves the images from the glasses over HTTP, since Bluetooth bandwidth is very limited, although they said they would be switching to only Bluetooth in the future. Even though the app doesn't give me AI descriptions when running in the background, I have been able to run my GPS apps in the background while the Seleste app is in the foreground, although audio from BlindSquare seems to conflict with the Seleste app.

Conclusion

Besides the small issues I mentioned, I really like these glasses. They are useful for many different tasks, including choosing and matching clothes, finding dropped items, reading labels, reading mail, etc. Since they use a general purpose AI model, what you can do with them is pretty much limited only by your imagination. I also like just having them describe what they can see in front of me, since there can often be a lot of visual information that I would normally miss, and its interesting to hear even when its not useful for anything. The app is updated frequently with bug fixes and improvements, and there is also a mailing list for Seleste users, where the two main people in the company often respond and help people with issues they may be having and take feedback.

To get the glasses, you pay a deposit of $100, and then $50 per month after that, which is much cheaper than competitors like the Envision glasses or OrCam, and in the long run, probably even the Meta glasses. They will also send you new hardware for no extra cost when they release it.