Sesame, the AI startup whose leadership includes former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe and Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell, plans to launch its own AI glasses next year.
“At Sesame, we’re making all-day glasses that sit alongside the best eyewear in the world, with an assistant you enjoy talking to,” Mitchell wrote in an announcement blog post Tuesday. “Today, intelligence still lives behind a screen. To become present, it needs new hardware built around it. Eyewear is the right form factor. We wear glasses all day, and take pride in our favorite frames. They’re also perfect for voice.”
Mitchell did not reveal many additional details about the device, other than that they will be made in Japan, with Sesame apparently aiming for an audience that appreciates artisanal craftsmanship. “Great frames are shaped, polished, and fitted by hand over days,” he wrote. “There are no shortcuts.”
With that approach, the company aims to differentiate itself from Meta and its Ray-Ban partnership. If Meta’s Ray-Bans are – pardon the lack of a better analogy for mass market spectacles – the Ray-Bans of AI wearables, then Sesame appears to aim for more of a Jaques Marie Mage approach: High end, high-priced and feeling more like a collectible than a consumer electronics device.
In conjunction with the announcement, Sesame also rolled out a major update to its AI agents, which have been in preview for a couple of months now. Originally built as a web demo that impressed with natural-sounding voices and mannerisms, Sesame’s AI agents now run on dedicated computers in the cloud, and are capable of accessing data from select Google apps, as well as logging into third-party websites.
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