Thanks to Meta, everyone wants a piece of the AI glasses pie. While Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses aren’t quite at iPhone levels of popularity, they’ve sold a lot more pairs than most were expecting, and as a result, competitors are cropping up left and right.

No, really, smart glasses competition is getting serious: In the pipeline are forthcoming entrants from Google, Samsung, and maybe (just maybe) Apple. Needless to say, when (or if) those competitors enter the chat, Meta is going to have its work cut out for it. In the meantime, there are other options, and some of them have come surprisingly close to challenging Meta already.

I’ve tried quite a few last year, but for me, Rokid’s latest pair, the $299 AI Glasses Style, might be the closest to giving Meta’s Ray-Bans a run for their money so far.

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Not Rok-solid marketing

So here’s the deal: the Rokid AI Glasses Style, despite their word-garbled name, are nicer than I expected, though I have some serious gripes about how they’re being marketed.

One of the things that immediately drew my attention to these display-less smart glasses was the weight. Rokid’s AI Glasses Style are advertised as weighing just north of 38g, which is notably less than the Ray-Ban Meta AI Gen 2 glasses. Meta’s smart glasses weigh between 48g and 50g, for context. Lighter smart glasses? Hell yeah.

There’s just one problem: that weight difference actually has a gigantic caveat. As I learned upon using them, the AI Glasses Style weigh 38.5g without the lenses. I bothered to weigh them myself at home, and they actually clock in at 45g, which is just 3g lighter than the lightest pair of Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. Womp, womp.

Why Rokid chose to list its smart glasses’ weight without the lenses is beyond me (I think I know why, though), but I was aggravated to learn that the figure was a stretch of the truth. That’s like listing a backpack’s weight without the straps or a phone’s weight without the chassis. It doesn’t make sense since you’re never, under any circumstance, going to be using your smart glasses without the lenses in them.

Weight makes a difference, too. A difference of 10g (which is actually only 3 to 5g) may not look like a lot on paper, but it makes a difference on your face, where gadgets can turn uncomfortable fast. That brings me to my next point of comparison: despite the small difference in weight, the AI Glasses Style don’t feel nearly as comfortable as the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses.

For me, that’s mostly because of the frame. While Rokid’s AI Glasses Style may look like a Ray-Ban dupe, they don’t always feel like one after longer periods of wear. The bridge really took a toll on my nose after a while, and having worn Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses for hours upon hours collectively, I can’t say that I felt the same fatigue wearing them.

That’s partially because I have a big nose, but also because of a difference in design. While Rokid opts for a bridge with nose pads (presumably for a tighter fit), the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are smooth. Even just running your finger through the bridge of both, Rokid’s smart glasses feel a lot more angular than the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. The actual frame design is where I feel the lack of EssilorLuxottica (the maker of Ray-Bans) the most, and while glasses are a specific thing to each person that wears them, the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses still have my vote in terms of comfort.

In appearance, Rokid’s look fairly similar to Meta’s, which is to say, like a Ray-Ban knockoff. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily—EssilorLuxottica’s Ray-Ban frames are iconic and popular for a reason. That reason is they fit well on lots of head shapes, they look generally stylish, but not obnoxious, and they mesh with lots of different styles of clothing.

Personally, I think the AI Glasses Style look pretty alright, but your take may vary. The frames, I’ve noticed, are a little wider than the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, which isn’t ideal for me since I don’t have a particularly wide face, but they may look better on your head. The plastic is a bit cheap-feeling, but I’ve never been a shiny plastic kind of guy. I still prefer the matte option of the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses.

Like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, you get almost the exact same set of tap and swipe controls on the glasses arm. One tap on the arm for things like play/pause, two taps for things like skipping songs, three taps to go back, and a tap and hold to launch the voice assistant. Swiping forward or backward controls volume. Nothing groundbreaking here, but they work as well as they should, though the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses might be a tad more sensitive.

One thing I do love about Rokid’s AI Glasses Style is that they have loads of lens options. You can get prescription lenses, progressive lenses, polarized lenses, transition lenses, blue light-blocking lenses, or just regular tinted lenses like the pair. tried. Rokid has Meta beat here for sure.

Overall, the AI Glasses Style look similar, but feel a little worse than the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. You should be wary of deceptive marketing, too. These smart glasses are not significantly lighter than Meta’s.

All of that said, these are smart glasses, and the smart part is where Rokid really competes.

Audio and video kind of rock

Rokid’s glasses don’t just look like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses; they’re also intended to be used in similar ways. One of the first things people will associate smart glasses with right now is audio, video, and pictures, so let’s get into that first.

The Rokid AI Glasses Style have a 12-megapixel Sony IMX681 sensor, which shoots at a max resolution of 3,024 x 4,032 pixels for still photos, and videos at a 3K resolution. One difference between Meta here is that Rokid, with its companion app, allows you to shoot photos and videos in quite a few ratios (9:16, 3:4, and 4:3) to fit a number of different scenarios, including posting straight to social media.

I shot with the AI Glasses Style for a week, and they do a fairly decent job. Photos were fairly sharp for smart glasses, and comparable to the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses (they both use a 12-megapixel Sony sensor, so no surprise here). While I wouldn’t want to do any professional photography with this camera, it’s serviceable for snapping stuff on the fly. Surprisingly, despite the higher resolution of Rokid’s sensor, I still prefer the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses’ photos, maybe because of the difference in image processing. It’s hard to put my finger on why, but I find Meta’s version of slightly soft-looking photos more appealing. Here’s a comparison: on the left is Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses and on the right is Rokid’s AI Glasses Style.

Video is also solid and comparable quality-wise to the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, with both topping out with a 3K resolution at 30 frames per second. Rokid gets the point here because its smart glasses can record up to a maximum of 10 freaking minutes as opposed to Ray-Ban Meta’s AI glasses that top out at 3 minutes. I found this out by accidentally recording a 5-minute video after I tried and failed to use the voice assistant to stop recording. A happy bug, I guess?

Either way, if you’re going to use the AI Glasses Style for action sports, or capturing video while riding your bike, or anything where you want to record for longer periods, that 10-minute recording limit is kind of great, especially with the option to shoot natively in different aspect ratios. Which pair of glasses you like for shooting pictures and videos may depend on your preference for image processing like me, but there’s no denying that the AI Glasses Style blow Ray-Bans out of the water in terms of recording length.

It’s worth noting here that, like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, there’s an LED light that turns on when you’re recording or taking a picture to let people know you’ve captured something. Whether anyone notices the light or knows what it means is another question entirely, but it’s there at least.

Those videos wouldn’t be complete without audio, and Rokid is also competitive in that arena. One of the best uses of smart glasses is as an open-ear audio product, so audio is more important than you might think on the surface, and Rokid’s AI Glasses Style seem to understand that. I was pleased with the quality of sound coming from Rokid’s new smart glasses as well as the volume.

I put these smart glasses through the same gauntlet as every audio product that I test, including using them on the New York subway, and they performed well. Sound is fairly clear, though a little more tinny-sounding than Meta’s glasses, and the volume was loud enough, though I couldn’t hear it as well as Meta’s glasses (maybe Meta’s glasses are more directional). I still think Meta takes this category, but Rokid doesn’t leave the fight without landing some punches.

One thing I’ll give Rokid here is its inclusion of more than one audio mode—one for general music listening and one for podcasts that EQs the sound to accentuate voices. I personally love the podcast setting since it does make voices more audible. I still wouldn’t want to use the AI Glasses Style on a loud subway, but you could say that for pretty much any open-ear audio product. It’s a nice flourish, and one that I’m going to assume Meta will look to replicate in the future.

As decent as the audio sounds, I have some notes on calling. I did 10 minutes of calling cumulatively with multiple people, and all of them could hear themselves on the call to a disruptive degree. I’m pretty sure that’s because the microphones on the AI Glasses Style are picking up what the speakers are putting out because when I turned the volume down, the problem went away. For the record, I’ve had no such issue on the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, so I’m pretty sure this issue is solvable with software. If you’re big on taking calls with smart glasses like I am, you may want to wait on using the AI Glasses Style for now.

Putting the AI in AI Glasses Style

The AI Glasses Style don’t break the mold entirely when it comes to display-less smart glasses, but they do come with a few things that I wish Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses had.

One of those things is navigation. Unlike the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, you can use the AI Glasses Style to get walking, biking, or driving directions to locations, all by using the onboard voice assistant. It’s kind of great. By saying “Hi Rokid, give me walking directions to the Brooklyn Museum,” the glasses start the navigation and give you turn-by-turn directions in your ear. If you pull open the companion app, you can also tap open a screen with a map to follow along. So many times while biking, I wished that Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses could launch navigation, so it’s nice to see Rokid making that wish a reality.

Like other smart glasses, you can use AI translation, and there’s a twist here, too. While most smart glasses are reliant on an internet connection to translate speech, Rokid’s AI Glasses style come with a downloadable local model that allows you to load six different languages onto the glasses for offline translation. Those languages are English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and simplified Chinese. I tested the local translation by listening to a YouTube video in French, and the results were not bad.

The AI Glasses Style have similar problems to other AI models (translation can be a bit literal and doesn’t always get sentence construction right), but it performed its duty better than I expected. I will say, however, that the local translation mode was a bit slow, so if you’re using this feature in the real world, you may have to ask the person you’re speaking with to slow down. Using online translation with Alibaba’s Qwen AI model was much, much, faster for me (impressively so), but that will depend on your internet connection, obviously.

Like other smart glasses, the AI Glasses Style will convert speech into a translated voice on the speakers, but also gives you an option to convert your speech, which is displayed in text on the companion app. To use this “DuoTalk” feature, as Rokid calls it, you’ll need to be online. I tested it by translating my speech into German, and it was equally as snappy as the other singular translation mode. Another nice touch on the translation front is the ability to direct your microphone to hear someone in front of you, or a 360-degree hearing mode to capture ambient noise. I’m going to assume most people will want to hear one person at a time, but maybe the 360-degree mode could be good for groups? Either way, the option is interesting.

In addition to translation and navigation, there are your usual smart glasses features like calling, though I wasn’t able to get Rokid’s companion app to recognize my contacts despite enabling permissions in iOS. There are also reminders, which work fine—I set a reminder to go grocery shopping and a voice popped up on time to remind me after I set it. Lastly, there’s a recording feature that allows you to capture audio and then use the companion app to generate a summary or word-for-word transcription. This feature also worked fairly well and was able to capture audio in a quiet room and transcribe it accurately.

Like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, there’s also computer vision that you can use for stuff like image-based translation. I’d say there’s parity here between Meta and Rokid. While Rokid’s AI was able to translate some stuff from a Japanese poster I pulled up online, it couldn’t read some of the smaller text. I don’t find this to be a particularly important battleground for smart glasses, though, if I’m being honest, since the use case feels a little niche.

If there’s a bright spot that I was hoping for software-wise, it’s in the voice assistant department and Rokid did an admirable job here, too. The last time I used a pair of Rokid smart glasses, they failed to recognize my “Hey, Rokid” wake command over and over, but the company seems to have fixed that this time around. Using the voice assistant on the AI Glasses Style is snappy and pretty efficient. It doesn’t get everything right all of the time, but it’s definitely less sloppy than Meta AI.

I do have one problem with Rokid’s voice assistant, and that’s its tendency to shut down the microphone too early. If you’re asking Rokid’s AI something, I would suggest getting the whole thing out in one fell swoop, since it seemingly gets bored with your yammering quickly.

Big boy battery, but Bluetooth bugginess

One thing that any person willing to wear smart glasses all the time seeks is battery life, and Rokid’s AI Glasses Style push the envelope here. The AI Glasses Style claim a 12-hour battery life, which I was skeptical of at first, but after using the smart glasses for a week, I think Rokid may actually have achieved it. As of writing these words, I’ve had the AI Glasses Style on for several hours with intermittent use and have only seen a 15% dip in battery.

Obviously, the battery will depend on what you’re doing. Rokid lists its battery life as a “typical use,” which is a gray area, and if you’re constantly playing music on the AI Glasses Style, I would expect a lot less. Still, if you’re listening sometimes, taking short calls, and using them incrementally throughout the day, you may manage to squeeze 12 hours out of the AI Glasses Style. For reference, the Meta Ray-Ban AI Glasses Gen 2 advertise a maximum of 8 hours of battery, so four more hours is nothing to scoff at.

Speaking of battery, one thing that I wish Rokid included was a charging case. With the purchase of the AI Glasses Style, all you get is a regular case. If you want one that charges, you’ll have to spend an additional $99. To charge the smart glasses without a charging case, you’ll need to use the included magnetic contact charger (a small dongle) that connects to USB-C and then clips onto the side of the glasses. I don’t love the idea of having to rely on a cheap, glasses-specific dongle for charging (what if you lose it or it frays?), but that’s what you’ll get from Rokid in the standard purchase.

One last thing to be aware of: I did have some Bluetooth issues with the AI Glasses Style, which caused them to disconnect abruptly, though after I downloaded an OTA update, there haven’t been any problems. Still, it’s worth mentioning since other smart glasses I’ve tested, like the Even Realities Even G2 glasses, have had persistent problems with that sort of thing.

Are these glasses my Rok?

As I mentioned previously, I was surprised at how functional Rokid’s AI glasses Style really are. They look decent, the AI features are functional and sometimes a cut above those offered by Meta, and audio, video, and picture are all competitive.

Whether these are the smart glasses for you will depend on what you want out of a pair. If you’re looking for the most comfortable and sleekest look, the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 AI glasses still win in my opinion, but if you’re in it for the AI then the AI Glasses Style might be the better option.

If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that Rokid is competition, and while it probably won’t unseat Meta from its pedestal any time soon, it goes to show you just how heated things are about to get. If Rokid can give Meta a scare, just imagine what Google or Samsung could do.