Do we want our AI to be wearable? A lot of companies are betting on it. From American

Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino. As we wrap up 2025, we're taking a look back at the tech trends that became kind of normal in the last year.

Today, AI enabled wearables, devices that let us take the power of large language models with us wherever we go,

so they can see or hear the world around us.

The market has grown to include multiple augmented reality glasses, AI note takers in the form

of pins, pendants, and bracelets, and new AI features added to old-school wearables, like

live translation for Apple AirPods.

Will Gatsagan is here to recap the year in AI wearables.

He's a staff writer at The Atlantic.

We spend so much time on our laptops and our phones, and they are the main way that we interact with chatbots right now.

But tech people are sort of pitching a secret third thing,

like another device that exists outside of the phone laptop diad, that can potentially reduce the

time we spend on our other devices, something that's more intuitive, that's maybe always on,

that gives us context about the things we experience every day in a more

natural and fluid way. But it also integrates with the AI we already use, right? Like, I think just the

fact that AI is integrating into every startup, into every device, some of the wearables we see now,

like Apple Watch and Aurora Ring, those didn't start as AI devices, but have become AI enabled as AI's taken off.

And you wrote about your experience with one particular device. It's been around for a while. Meta's AI

glasses. How did those work? How did you find them? Right. So Meta is going around the country,

opening up a series of pop-up stores.

They're basically these all-blue skate shop themed little stores, and they're built around

advertising meta's newest iteration of the AI glasses. Like you said, AI glasses have been around

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