China’s Oppo unveils prototype augmented reality glasses with voice assistant as AI hype hits gadgets

BARCELONA – Oppo on Monday unveiled a prototype set of augmented reality (AR) glasses with a voice assistant, underscoring how electronics giants are trying to infuse artificial intelligence across their products to stand out.

Oppo, a Chinese firm and one of the world's biggest smartphone makers, announced the Oppo Air Glass 3 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

They look like a regular pair of glasses with Oppo trying to find a design that can be worn every day as a companion to a smartphone. Since they are AR glasses, users can see digital content imposed over the real-world view they see in front of them. This could be information such as a message or perhaps a map for navigation.

The Air Glass 3 needs to be tethered to an Oppo smartphone. Users can control the glasses with touch sensors on the side of the frame.

Oppo said that its latest AR glasses are equipped with a voice assistant which is powered by the Chinese tech giant's own large language model (LLM) called AndesGPT. LLMs are AI models trained on a huge amount of data and underpin many of the chatbots, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, which have exploded in popularity over the past year and a half.

The voice assistant is currently only available in China, Oppo said in a press release. The chatbot is capable of "performing information searches and conducting conversations to assist users in tasks like planning travel," Oppo said.

This year electronics makers are talking up the way AI features have been put into their products amid an explosion in popularity and hype around the technology. Oppo is one of the many tech firms in China that has developed its own LLM, alongside others like Alibaba and Baidu.

Meanwhile, other smartphone makers outside of China are relying