Solos AirGo 3

Verdict

The Solos AirGo 3 are another solid example of audio smartglasses that can be useful to wear, but ultimately are let down in a few areas that make them tricky to recommend to everyone.

Introduction

The Solos AirGo 3 are smart glasses that don’t plant a screen in front of your eyes, instead focusing on turning to voice to let you interact with a ChatGPT-powered chatbot that has the power to pull up recipes or help you translate languages on the move.

These are also glasses that will play music, track your daily step count and even try to correct your posture if you’re slouching at your desk.

To give them added appeal, Solos packs those smarts in glasses you’d typically like to wear, whether that’s as shades or something to protect your eyes on runs. Do the Solos AirGo 3 mark another important step for smartglasses? I donned them to find out.

Design

• Fairly inconspicuous from a distance
• You can add presription frames
• Control inputs are a little cramped together

The key to any good set of smart glasses is that you’re actually going to want to wear them. The days of Google Glass thankfully seem well behind us and we are getting the kind of connected eyewear you can almost mistake for a regular set of specs. I’d say the AirGo 3 does a pretty good job of hiding its smarts with the temples of the glasses.

With the AirGo 3, Solos is offering multiple frame options and the ability to pack those smarts into regular glasses, sunglasses and sports glasses. I opted for the regular eyeglasses as it’s not exactly sunny enough to bring out the shades and I’m not a fan of donning glasses for workouts either.

Solos handily does let you add a prescription to your pair, which is something I chose to do, and you have frame and lens options here too. You’ve got your pick of photochromic, blue blocker and polarised lenses, so you really have the scope to make them easy to replace your regular pair.

At 35g, the glasses themselves weigh a touch heavier than a regular pair of glasses and that seems to be felt most at the upper section of the temples. Those temples can actually be removed to reveal USB-C style connectors that let you further customise the glasses and charge the device. Those USB-C ports don’t however have the ability to power up your other devices, which might have been a nice added feature here, although it would have no doubt bolstered the overall weight as well. Unlike the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, there isn’t a charging case that doubles as a regular case to drop these into.

To physically interact with the glasses, Solos has employed a touch sensor, a virtual button and the ability to tap the upper section of the right temple. The touch sensor lets you slide your fingers up and down to adjust volume, the virtual button lets you skip tracks during Bluetooth streaming, and summon the SolosChat feature. You can also tap to access your phone’s smart assistant or play and pause music. With all of these controls situated so close together it can make identifying the right area tricky at times and it might have been beneficial to distribute those controls across both temples.

From a durability point of view, Solos has given the AirGo 3 an IP67 waterproof rating, which means they can be submerged in water up to one metre for 30 minutes. The glasses in general feel well-built and I’ve not experienced any issues with the frame or the lenses indoors or outside.

Features and performance

• Carry out AI commands and questioning on the go
• There’s a subscription model for enhanced AI features
• The glasses can also detect your move time and step count

There’s a lot to get into here in terms of what the AirGo 3 can do. Inside the frames lies open-ear, directional stereo speakers and beamforming microphones along with Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity. The latter lets you connect to the Solos companion smartphone app, which is available for both Android and iOS. The speakers and microphones let you listen to music and make use of the ChatGPT-powered SolosChat features. In addition to that, Solos finds room for motion sensors that allow the glasses to track movement and deliver the posture correcting feature that’s supported here. As I said, there’s a lot here.

Some of the Solos features are free to use; the SolosChat and ChatGPT integration,  messaging support and fitness tracking features won’t cost you anything. If you’re willing to hand over $9.99 a month, you’ll enjoy enhanced text-to-speech support, have the ability to use the SolosChat feature without the glasses and be able to view more extended ChatGPT history, so you actually you get the most compelling features here for free, which is good to see.

I’ll start with Solos Chat, which is essentially a ChatGPT bot that you need to enable in the app before tapping the virtual button on the glasses to ask the kind of things you’d usually ask ChatGPT for. That could be a recipe, learning about a topic or sending a text message via voice. There’s also a useful translation mode where you can simply ask the glasses the best way to say something in a range of different languages, or choose to listen in on a conversation to understand what’s being talked about.

The responsiveness and reliability of the microphones in general is pretty good, but there were definitely a few occasions where it didn’t pick up queries I’d asked correctly. On the whole its recognition powers impressed. The translation support feels the most useful element here and is able to translate in a range of languages in a pretty speedy fashion. Something that this chatbot cannot do is tell you about live information, which does mean tapping into your phone smart assistant instead.

The sound quality of the speakers is in line with sub-par, open-ear, air conduction headphones that I’ve tested, and certainly doesn’t deliver the best sound I’ve experienced on a set of audio glasses. The emphasis is on clarity over balance and if you’re hoping for power and bass, that’s not what you get here. I also found that when the SolosChat feature is enabled and you opt to listen to music, the sound becomes distorted, so you’ll need to disable that mode to get the best sound quality from them.

The fitness features are an interesting inclusion here. You can track daily steps and see your distance covered and move time, much like a standard pedometer. There’s also a posture tracker mode which requires a short calibration before it can tell if you’ve been slouching, and whether it’s an acceptable level of slouching or something more severe. It also supports the ability to track workouts like running, cycling and tackling a marathon. 

You can also connect it to Strava but you need to disable the SolosChat feature to be able to use it. That’s one of the disconnects you get with some elements here. You can’t ask for your latest step count in the chat feature as live data isn’t supported, but it would have been a nice integration. These aren’t the style of glasses I’d choose to work out in, though as a way to track some basic data they do feel more useful. I’m not sure they’d be replacing my dedicated sports watch any time soon.

App

• Available for both Android and iOS
• Could do with a design overhaul
• EQ modes are hidden away

The Solos AirGo app isn’t the best-looking companion app I’ve encountered but it’s generally easy enough to get around and work out where features live. I focused on using the iPhone version, which didn’t throw up any connectivity issues.

It’s essentially broken up into three sections with a big button for the SolosChat, a dedicated section for the fitness features and another for the device settings. It’s certainly worth spending some time in those settings so you can truly appreciate what these glasses are capable of. This is where I discovered that you could pair two devices at once to the glasses, tap into EQ modes to try and improve the overall sound quality and even adjust the sensitivity of the touch controls.

Battery life

• Up to 10-hours of use
• 1.5-hours to charge a full battery
• A longer battery life would have been apprecaited

In terms of battery life, Solos promises up to 10 hours of streaming music or 7 hours of making calls. It takes 1.5 hours to fully charge and you have a quick charge feature that gives you 3 hours battery from a 15-minute charge. I’d say that those numbers ring pretty true of my experience. Although, if you’re using a mixture of the fitness and voice features on a regular basis then you’re likely to notice that it drains a lot faster.

I’d definitely like more battery, but the standby mode works well enough to ensure they’re not idly draining power when they’re not on your face.

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