XGIMI MemoMind One review: Smart glasses, creepy AI

XGIMI says the MemoMind One doesn't have a camera as the company is focused on the privacy of both its users and the general public. That's the right idea, as I object to the concept of walking around with a camera attached to my face. However, this pitch is undermined by the Moments feature, which outrages and confuses me in equal measure. In essence, it's a journal of your day: The glasses' built-in microphones are recording what you're doing at all times.

Yeah... I know.

The data is then processed by an AI to generate a summary of what it perceives you have done to create a summary of your day.

Yeah... I know.

At the risk of being glib, the whole self-enrolling into such a dystopian process isn't even the worst part of this whole thing. The journal entry it produces is like hearing a record of your own life being recounted back to you after it's been twisted and contorted after a centuries long game of Telephone conducted by the permanently baffled.

During a lunch break, I watched my friend's YouTube video as he'd told me about it in the pub a few days earlier. He reviews model airplane kits, and had gone early to pick up a limited edition set before they'd sold out. This, of course, piqued my curiosity. Memories, however, told me that I'd bought and unboxed the kit, unaware I was watching a video featuring someone else's voice. It even noted the pre-roll advert for Sage accounting software, telling me that I'd been involved with an issue at work as I'd forwarded along an invoice to "the wrong Sarah."

That's not an isolated incident. It's the default, and most days I'd look through the record to try and find a single thing that actually happened. It told me I'd applied for a job at a psychology practice (my friend mentioned his interest in doing so), hung out with someone called Charles (no idea) and been visited by a married couple called Paul and Zoe (nope). Troublingly, the weekly recap I received wasn't even in English but arrived in Simplified Chinese, the system forgetting which languages I can and cannot read.

Wishes is a second feature branching off from Memories where the system logs any time you offer an opinion that could be coded as yearning. If you use the phrase "I really want" or similar, it'll log it. And like Memories, if you hear someone else say that, or hear it on TV, it'll get equal treatment. For instance, I was watching an episode of Babylon 5 ("Messages from Earth") where Garibaldi wanted to read a translated version of the Book of G'Quan. I shudder to think what would happen if the authorities got hold of my logs the day after I'd watched a crime drama.

To add insult to injury, XGIMI expects users to pay $19.99 a month for the privilege of using this journaling feature. Or, if you pre-order the glasses with a $30 deposit, you'll get a year's worth of the service for free. Which, to me, is reason enough to not pre-order it.