Stanford students promise no more "awkward" dates thanks to GPT-4 glasses that listen

Are you nervous during dates? Dread job interviews? These glasses will help you out. Sort of.

A team of Stanford students has built a pair of smart glasses they say can listen to your conversations and tell you "exactly" what to say next in high-pressure social situations.

"Say goodbye to awkward dates and job interviews," student Bryan Tau-Ping Chiang tweeted. Dubbed rizzGPT, the device provides its wearer "real-time Charisma as a Service (CaaS)," he said.

The glasses were built using a clip-on augmented reality (AR) monocle made and donated by Brilliant Labs, OpenAI's large language model GPT-4, and its speech recognition software, Whisper.

Whisper allows the glasses to feed speech recorded by the monocle, which features a camera and a microphone, directly to GPT-4 to produce answers that are then displayed on the high-resolution screen of the monocle.

While it only takes mere seconds, the delay is long enough for the speaker's language to sound stunted, as is apparent in a brief video demonstration shared by Tau-Ping Chiang.

The clip shows Stanford's Alix Cui interviewing student Varun Shanoy over a job prospect, with Shanoy reading out responses generated by the glasses. Because of the delay and of the reading, the conversation does not sound natural, making it, in fact, even more awkward.

Despite this and the gadget's somewhat clunky design, it offers a glimpse at the future of human communication, with AR and artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly seen as something that will replace smartphones and apps.

"We imagine a new era of ambient computing enabled by AR + AI, where everyone has their own personal assistant available 24/7," Tau-Ping Chiang said on Twitter.

He added: "It's like having God observe your life and tell you exactly what to do next."