Open source collaboration brings voice and vision AI directly to consumer hardware, keeping sensitive data out of the cloud.
London, March 5, 2026–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Brilliant Labs, Neuphonic, and TheStage AI today announced a strategic partnership to bring frontier AI to wearable technology without the latency or privacy compromises of cloud computing.
Currently, AI inference such as audio and image analysis relies on models hosted in the cloud, which introduces unnecessary delays and risks exposing user data. This partnership solves this problem by moving processing directly to consumer-grade hardware, protecting sensitive viewpoint data, and improving performance through faster response times.
Brilliant Labs is gearing up to launch its latest smart glasses, Halo. In addition to on-device visual inference, Halo uses Neuphonic’s conversational AI model on an inference engine built by TheStage AI. This architecture challenges the foundations of cloud-dependent products from leading companies like Meta and Snap, putting user privacy and latency at the center of the user experience.
This partnership represents a new paradigm in wearable architecture:
Brilliant Labs releases groundbreaking AI memory capabilities through its open source eyewear platform in one of the slimmest form factors.
Neuphonic provides a conversational interface where its ultra-low-latency text-to-speech technology runs locally, turning your device into a conversation partner with human-like responsiveness.
Finally, TheStage AI provides an automated inference engine that optimizes AI models to run efficiently on the edge, ensuring instant processing without draining your battery.
By combining these strengths, Brilliant Labs offers customers an unprecedented AI wearable experience where audio, visual, and sensor data is processed locally on the user’s device. This means that raw perspective data never leaves the user’s phone or glasses.
This architecture stands in stark contrast to cloud-dependent AI models that rely on remote inference for messaging, voice, and image analysis. Recent research has raised questions about whether major platforms are breaking their privacy promises. These concerns become even more acute as AI systems expand beyond text to always-on microphones and cameras. This partnership offers an alternative: intelligent wearables that deliver advanced AI through an open source stack designed for transparency, trust, and independent monitoring while keeping sensitive visual and conversational data local.
“We believe in a privacy-first future for personal computing. Soon, AI glasses will be everywhere around us, and always-on cameras and microphones will be recording our lives. That can be either exciting or scary, depending on where the data resides and who is monetizing it,” said Bobak Tavangal, CEO of Brilliant Labs and former Apple program lead. “We don’t want our children to grow up in a world where their data is sold to the highest bidder. This partnership shows there is a better way. And by embracing open source, we want people to understand how these systems work, build on them, and ultimately foster trust. That’s the standard we think the industry should uphold.”
“When it comes to conversations, speed and privacy are everything. We can’t wait for the cloud to think for us,” said Sohaib Ahmad, CEO of Nuphonic. “We are delivering the ‘voice’ of this new ecosystem. By running our advanced voice model directly on Brilliant’s hardware, we have unlocked a conversation experience that feels real, immediate, and completely private.”
TheStage AI ensures that this tedious task is done smoothly. “Good hardware and good models require a bridge, and that’s what we’re building,” said Kirill Solodoskik, CEO of TheStage AI. “Running conversational AI on glasses is a huge computational challenge. Peak memory, latency, and power consumption must be managed to make responses feel immediate. Our core technology, ANNA, optimizes Neuphonic’s models and supporting components (transcription, wake words, diaryization, etc.) to run efficiently on smartphones paired with glasses. Deploying on an accelerator provides the best possible performance on the device.”
We look forward to the release of Brilliant’s Halo glasses and support:
Context-aware conversational AI that sees and hears in real-time.
Private memory that indexes what you see and hear and later recalls it to provide personalized context.
Vibe Mode is a natural language interface that generates custom AI mini-apps on demand, from on-demand AI agents to enterprise workflows.
All visual and audio inputs are processed on-device and converted to encrypted embeddings. Brilliant Labs’ Halo glasses with integrated Neuphonic voice AI will be available in Q1 2026 for $349.
About Brilliant Lab
Brilliant Labs is an integrated AI hardware and software company pioneering open source intelligent wearables. Founded in 2019, Brilliant Labs combines custom-designed hardware with open-source, privacy-first artificial intelligence to create experiences that evolve with users. Backed by leading investors, Brilliant Labs is driving a clear vision for AI wearables centered around creativity, curiosity, and trust. For more information, please visit brilliant.xyz.
About Newphonic
Neuphonic builds high-performance voice AI models designed to run natively on consumer edge devices. By running on CPU-only hardware, Neuphonic is private by default and provides highly cost-effective real-time, low-latency voice interaction. With over 1 million open source downloads, we are now partnering with leading OEMs to incorporate our technology directly into their next-generation products. For more information, visit neuphonic.com.
About The Stage AI
TheStage AI builds an AI infrastructure platform that enables teams to run AI models faster and more cost-effectively on their own hardware and edge devices. ANNA (Automated Neural Networks Accelerator) allows teams to control quality and latency tradeoffs under real-world constraints such as memory and power through a simple slider interface. Generate deployable builds through TheStage AI’s compilation and delivery toolchain. TheStage AI also provides a library of pre-optimized models and a playground for pre-deployment benchmarking. For more information, please visit thestage.ai.
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