Brilliant Labs Halo (and Frame) vs NotePin in 2026

Brilliant Labs Halo (and Frame)

Brilliant Labs makes open-source AI smart glasses: the Frame (2024) and the newer Halo (announced July 2025). Both are open-source (hardware and SDK on GitHub; Lua on-device plus Python/Flutter), which sets them apart from the closed Meta and Humane ecosystems. The Noa assistant routes to cloud models (Perplexity, OpenAI, Whisper), and Halo licenses Liquid AI's on-device model.

Pricing runs about $349 for Frame and $299 to $349 for Halo. AI substance is moderate: developer-accessible and hackable rather than the most polished.

NotePin

The Plaud NotePin (by Plaud.AI, San Francisco, founded 2023) is a lightweight wearable AI voice recorder worn as a clip, pendant, or wristband: a notes-pendant form factor distinct from the glasses, earbuds, necklace, and ring entries in the cohort. It taps to record meetings and conversations and uses third-party large language models (GPT, Claude, and Gemini) for transcription and AI summarization, and independent reviews confirm those core features work as advertised, placing it in the genuine-cloud-AI tier.

It launched in August 2024 at about $169 with an optional Pro subscription, and a successor, the NotePin S, launched in January 2026 in the same price range. DEPLOY records it at commercial maturity: it ships, is purchasable, and is independently verified as functional, and it is a tier-1 citation winner in Google's AI Overview for 'best wearable AI' queries.

Its model is subscription-augmented (a free tier plus a paid tier for more transcription minutes), the inverse of Hey Pocket's no-subscription-core posture. One cap-flag: Plaud's sales and revenue figures (more than a million devices, profitability, and $180-to-$250 million annualized revenue) are company self-reports, recorded as claimed rather than independently audited.