Smart glasses are still waiting for their iPhone moment, when one product unites a mishmash of disparate ideas into a single highly functional and cool model. Judging from the feature list, the $199 Solos AirGo3 look quite promising: You can use the glasses to talk to AI via ChatGPT, and the AI can also translate conversations in real time if you’re trying to talk to someone who speaks a different language. In addition, the glasses can talk to your phone’s digital assistant, send texts, play music, remind you to drink water, track your steps, and guide you through stretches and workouts. Unfortunately, not all of these features work properly, and even the ones that do feel clunky. We recommend passing on these smart glasses, and opting for a pair of smart assistant-enabled earphones like the Amazon Echo Buds ($119.99), which offer far superior audio quality and hands-free Alexa voice control.
Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. See how we test.
Specs and SmartsThe Solos AirGo3 Smart Glasses offer all the same functionality as the older AirGo2, plus AI-enabled smarts via ChatGPT. With ChatGPT, the AirGo3 can reply to questions and comments conversationally, help compose texts and emails, and translate conversations so you can speak to someone using a foreign language. They don’t have any augmented reality or virtual reality capabilities like the highly capable and expensive Apple Vision Pro ($3,499) or the AR-focused Rokid Max ($439). They also lack an embedded lens to take pictures like the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses ($299). Whether you want sunglasses or eyeglasses, the Solos AirGo3 Smart Glasses come in a few different styles, sizes, and colors so you can find a pair that suits you. I tested a pair of sporty sunglasses called Helium 1 in Mirror Orange Red. The Argon and Xeon styles have simpler designs, and all support adding a prescription and upgrades like anti-blue light, polarized, photochromic, and UV-blocking lenses.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
With all styles, the arms can pop free from the front frames so that you can mix and match looks based on the occasion. You can buy additional frame fronts for $89 and up, depending on the style. The Solos website has a sizing guide to ensure you find frames that fit. My medium-sized pair fit comfortably and felt light to wear at 1.38 ounces. By default, they come with an anti-reflection and oil-resistant coating. They have an IP67 rating, which means they can withstand dust for an extended period of time and can be immersed in about three feet of fresh water for 30 minutes. That makes them slightly more durable than the Nautica Smart Eyewear Powered by Lucyd, which have an IP56 rating. Both the Ray-Ban Metas and the Amazon Echo Frames have an even lower IPX4 rating.In terms of battery life, Solos promises 10 hours of music playback on a charge, but the glasses only lasted for eight hours in testing. That’s not bad, as the Amazon Echo Frames offer six hours of playback time, and the Ray-Ban Meta only last up to four hours on a charge. Nautica’s glasses offer the best battery life of the bunch, at 13 hours. Getting Started With the AirGo3Even before I set them up, the Solos AirGo3 Smart Glasses surprised me twice. The first surprise was a pleasant one: The glasses come with both a hard case for storage and a dust bag. You also get a magnetic charging cable, a microfiber cleaning cloth, and instructions.The second surprise was not as pleasant. I ordered the sunglasses with my prescription, and I was taken aback to find a second, small set of prescription lenses nestled on the inside. The prescription lenses aren’t visible to others when you’re wearing the glasses in bright sunlight, but they can be seen outside of direct sunlight, which made me feel a bit self-conscious. This isn’t an issue with other AirGo3 styles, which incorporate prescriptions into the main lenses, according to Solos.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
Style ding aside, I like the way they look on me, so I quickly overcame my initial disappointment and proceeded to set up the glasses. Setup requires the Solos AirGo app for Android or iOS. When you open the app, it prompts you to enable location services, allow it to find nearby devices, and agree to the terms and conditions. Next, you need to find and select your specific model of glasses. The app will then walk you through powering on the glasses and turning up the volume. The right arm holds a multipurpose touch-sensitive virtual button you need to hold down to turn the glasses on. The virtual button also lets you control music playing through the glasses and access your phone’s virtual assistant. Beside the virtual button is an indented portion of the arm that houses a touch sensor used for swiping. Swipe the touch sensor toward your ear to increase the volume, or away from your ear to decrease it. I found that control a bit counterintuitive as I often wanted to swipe forward from my perspective to increase the volume.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
The app then prompts you to start “AI unboxing.” I agreed, and the voice assistant walked me through the process of pairing the glasses to my phone and selecting an avatar for my profile. Out of the avatar options, I picked a cat wearing a futuristic headset. After that, it walked me through the built-in controls and supported voice commands before prompting me for my name and audio preferences. The glasses can play music in either a Balanced, Dynamic, or Relaxed profile, and they sample all three EQ presets before asking for your choice. Then, the app asks you to enable Whisper Messages and Whisper Events so the glasses can audibly read your texts and calendar reminders, respectively. To enable these features, you need to ensure your phone is not silencing notifications and give the app access to those notifications. The glasses come with a three-month premium Solos AirGo app subscription ($9.99 per month after that), which offers extended ChatGPT history storage and lets you cut and paste AI-generated content without a watermark. Without a subscription, you can still access the assistant and messaging features as well as fitness tracking as long as you have the glasses. You can use the premium version of the app without the glasses if you want to try out the various features before investing in a pair. The Solos AirGo3 Smart Glasses offer a long list of features, but after trying them all out, I found most to be clunky and unintuitive at best, with some features nonfunctional or actively detrimental at worst.For starters, to talk to ChatGPT you need to hold the button down the entire time you’re speaking. That’s a pain, but not a deal breaker. The chatbot in the Solos app functions similarly to the native ChatGPT client. It’s capable of producing entire essays in response to a prompt and can hold a conversation reasonably well as long as you don’t ask for up-to-date information. It’s nice having this kind of advanced assistance on the go in a pair of glasses, but holding the button down to talk isn’t the only inconvenience. The form factor itself acts as a hindrance, as ChatGPT often gives long answers I prefer to simply read versus listen to over the speakers in the glasses. Helpfully, you can also see the replies written out in the app, and copy and paste them as needed.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
Another annoyance is that you need to enable SolosChat in the app before you can start talking to the AI through the glasses. The app also offers a button to talk to the AI through your phone, rendering the glasses unnecessary to the process. Now, you might think you can just enable the SolosChat feature and leave it on, which would be a reasonable expectation. You can, technically, but doing so limits the glasses’ onboard controls and significantly degrades their sound quality.With SolosChat turned on, the virtual button on the right arm of the glasses only functions for talking to ChatGPT, and no longer lets you turn the glasses off, control your music, or summon your phone’s voice assistant. Moreover, it must completely monopolize the bandwidth of the device to have the AI assistant standing by, as music playback sounds absolutely horrible when SolosChat is enabled. Every track I listened to sounded quiet, distorted, and tinny, like it was coming from an old phone. With SolosChat turned off, you can tap the virtual button to play and pause music or double-tap it to summon your phone’s digital assistant. For simple questions, you’re better off just doing that and getting answers from Siri or Google Assistant. While listening to music, you can long-press the button to go to the next song or double-tap to go back a track. A lot of these controls work whether you tap the small virtual button or anywhere else on the frame. That said, I had less luck getting the controls to reliably work the further out I tapped from the main control button. Even with SolosChat turned off and tapping on or near that button, the glasses only responded to my touches correctly about two-thirds of the time. Music does sound much better with SolosChat turned off, but still not great. The audio quality is on par with the Nautica glasses, which is to say, unimpressive. Bass was mostly absent from the tracks I played, and any audio playing through the glasses leaked like a sieve. Be aware that others will certainly be able to hear your music and both sides of your phone calls if you’re using these glasses in public. Other than those limitations, the glasses offer a reasonably accurate and pleasant listening experience.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
Outside of serving as a chatbot and getting in the way of listening to music, the AI built into the glasses promises other useful functions. You can pick your default messaging client in the app and have SolosMessage compose texts or emails for you, but this feature was a huge letdown in testing. The first time I asked the AI to compose a text to a friend, it told me it didn’t understand. I tried again, then found out you need to manually switch over the functionality in the app. To send a text by voice, you need to tap Apps, then SolosMessage to switch to that feature specifically. This again begs the question of how the glasses themselves are actually helping, since by the time you pull out your phone, switch on the assistant, toggle over to the correct feature, and hold down the button on the frames, you might as well just hold the button down in the app itself or send a text yourself without using the app. Technology has already advanced past this point, as Google Assistant and Siri can both easily read texts and emails to you with a voice command without you needing to open an app and let it know exactly what you’re doing.The glasses did reliably read my incoming text messages via the WhisperMessage feature, but they also hid the message notification on my phone while doing so. They even marked the messages as read in my messaging app, so if I was distracted or listening to something else and didn’t notice the glasses reading me a text, my phone would show no visible record of it coming through. If I opened the messaging app, I’d see no unread text messages needing my attention either. Lost in TranslationThankfully, the SolosTranslate feature does actually work, but using it is just as clunky as talking to the AI. If you want to understand someone who is speaking in a foreign language, you need to pull out your phone, tap the Apps button, switch to SolosTranslate, and turn on the assistant. Then, hopefully, you know which language they’re speaking. The app isn’t smart enough to automatically recognize it and help you out. You need to tell it which language you’re translating from and to. Even then, just like with the SolosChat feature, you need to hold down the button the entire time that someone is talking. The glasses will then translate in writing in the app and speak the translation out loud (if it clearly heard the person talking). Most of the mics are pointed at you, so you need to make sure that the person talking in front of you is speaking loud and clear or the glasses will miss it. I tested the feature with a few of my neighbors, and it always translated accurately when it heard what the person said, but regularly missed phrases or entire sentences. To speak back, you can then hold the text button in your phone and speak in English, and the phone will translate back to the other language. Given that you can’t use this feature without actively holding and using your phone, the glasses again feel mostly like an appendix in this equation. You might as well just use the Google Translate app. The Solos Group feature lets you have a multi-person conversation or presentation with it translating for all, but everyone needs to have the Solos app on their own phone and sync to the conversation, which certainly feels more like wishful thinking than an actual solution for a multilingual conference. Token Fitness TrackingOutside of AI, the app can lead you in guided exercises like walking, running, or stretching your neck to fix your posture. It can also track steps, remind you to drink water, and monitor your posture. I tried the stretching exercise first and was expecting something easy and relaxing. The app offered clear stretching instructions, but then proceeded to beep loudly like an alarm the entire time I was supposed to hold the position. It was the opposite of relaxing. When trying a walking exercise, the glasses told me to move to a set cadence, but I couldn’t hear any given beat even at max volume. At a certain point, I forgot I was tracking an activity and was just enjoying my walk when, out of nowhere, the glasses suddenly blared “walk faster” at peak volume. I was so startled that I nearly jumped out of my shoes. This motivated me to walk faster, but I was offered no feedback afterward.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
The tracked stats are also paltry compared with even the simplest smartwatch or fitness tracker. I was reminded to drink water regularly, but only at a preset cadence and only (ironically given how it handles text messages) via a push notification on my phone and not audibly through the glasses. The app doesn’t have a way to input intake, so you’ll get a reminder whether or not you are actually hydrated. Verdict: Better on PaperThe Solos AirGo3 Smart Glasses have a list of attractive features, but most of them hold up poorly in practice, and you can easily replicate the bulk of them with your phone. And since you need to use the Solos app for most of the AI features, the glasses don’t add much convenience over simply using your phone instead. If you really want a pair of connected specs, go with the Ray-Ban Metas, which cost $100 more than the AirGo3, but sound better and feature a 12MP camera for discreetly capturing social photos and videos. If you’re looking for more practical smarts, stick with a good pair of earbuds and your phone’s digital assistant.
Like What You’re Reading?
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
