Smart Eyewear Maker Lucyd Rolls Out AI Newscasts and Gemini Integration in Latest App Update
Miami-based smart eyewear company Innovative Eyewear has unveiled a swag of new AI-powered features for its Lucyd app, aimed at expanding what wearers can do with their Bluetooth audio glasses; a development eyecare professionals stocking the brand's frames may want to get across.
The company, which designs and manufactures smart eyewear under the Lucyd, Lucyd Armor, Reebok, Eddie Bauer and Nautica labels, announced the update this week, with the headline feature being a "Newscast" widget that generates custom, AI-narrated news bulletins read aloud through the glasses.
Wearers set their interests and preferred bulletin length in the app, then trigger a report either through the widget or with a "Lucyd News" voice command. A large language model pulls current news and delivers it in a podcast-style format, refreshing with new content each time it's activated. The company says the feature is designed to let people keep across current affairs hands-free, without scrolling through news sites. It's due to go live in the app next week.
The update also broadens the app's AI options. Alongside existing ChatGPT and Claude integrations, users can now tap into Google's Gemini for image generation and general AI queries, with custom API key syncing to personal Gemini accounts planned down the track. That feature is live now.
Innovative Eyewear has also added multimodal AI conversations, letting wearers move a single AI chat thread seamlessly between the glasses' audio interface and the app's visual interface, picking up where they left off regardless of which mode they started in. Those conversations can be saved and exported.
Android users get two further additions: the ability to set Lucyd as their phone's default voice assistant for direct access via the action button or the glasses themselves, and a new floating widget that lets them switch between AI models on the fly.
CEO Harrison Gross said the newscast feature was a response to his own frustration with doomscrolling. "A custom, AI-generated podcast perfectly tailored to the individual is an elegant solution for cutting down screen time and impulsive scrolling, while still getting the information you want," he said, adding that the Gemini integration and Android improvements would appeal to "our more Google-inclined users."
For practices carrying Lucyd or its licensed-brand frames, the update underscores the company's push to differentiate on software rather than optics alone, a trend worth watching as smart eyewear increasingly competes for shelf space against traditional dispensing lines.
