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AR glasses have had a rough start to life. They were born as a scifi dream come to life but there were instantly some unattractive hurdles: chunky headsets, washed-out displays and a lack of usefulness. Good news! I’ve been trying out the INMO GO3 and they may be the most convincing attempt I’ve seen at changing that.
These things look incredibly similar to a normal pair of glasses, which is one of the biggest things to overcome for this tech to succeed. But there’s more than just how they look on the outside that makes them worth knowing about. A few years ago INMO launched the world’s first wire-free AI smart glasses with a monocular display and the GO2 doubled down on that with a focus on translation and the teleprompter feature (which I’ll get to later).
The GO3 is where everything has started to come together, pushing the industry forward again with a product that has seen INMO rank number one in terms of sales volume from 2021-2025. Is the hype worth it? Let’s find out.
INMO GO3 Key Specs at a Glance
The INMO GO3 features dual Micro-LED panels, 1,500 nits of brightness, real-time translation across 98 languages, and weighs just 58g. The swappable 270mAh magnetic battery is topped up by a 1,300mAh charging case.
The display
The GO3 uses some very fancy tech that I don’t really understand. I’m going to say it to you now so be warned, but it is important to know. The GO3 has dual Micro-LED panels with diffractive waveguide optics which is a binocular setup feeding both lenses from a single light engine. I warned you that would be a load of jargon but it means the result is 1,500 nits of brightness, more than enough to operate outdoors in direct light.
The waveguide design also means the display is invisible to anyone around you. Use it on the Tube, in a meeting or a café and nobody else can see your screen. The glasses also take custom prescription and sunglass lenses, which goes a long way towards making them actually wearable day-to-day.
Translation: the standout feature
The INMO GO3 supports real-time bidirectional (meaning both incoming speech and outgoing speech) translation across 98 languages, with output into 98. You can swap LLM translation providers or even bring in your own if you like.
The photo translation is the most immediately useful from my experience. You know when you take a photo of something then send it to Google Translate? Well, with the GO3 you can just look at a foreign menu or road sign, say “Hey Inmoo, translate what’s in front of me,” and it snaps a photo and projects the translation into your view. I know its cliche but you can’t help feel a bit sci-fi when this happens.
The optional clip-on INMO Speaker adds two-way dialogue translation. When someone says something to you, it appears as translated subtitles and then what you say gets spoken aloud in their language via the built-in speakers in 77 languages.
Another really cool by-product of this is that if you set both languages to the same one, the GO3 becomes a real-time captioning device for deaf and hard-of-hearing users. Whatever someone says appears as text in your view immediately which is a real game-changer in my view!
If you’re comparing smart wearables in the same space, our Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 hands-on is worth a read too.
Battery and usability
The built-in 270mAh battery lives in the arm of the glasses and snaps on magnetically. This is a really nifty system because it means you can swap it out in seconds for a fully charged one, drop the dead one in the charging case, and keep going.
The 1,300mAh case holds three to four full charges, with the standby battery life sitting at over eight hours which drops to around three hours per battery with active translation and teleprompter use running.
As for usability, these are some of the least intrusive smart glasses I’ve ever used. The weight is one of the lowest on the market but it’s the very slim body profile that makes the difference. Most other manufacturers I’ve used were just a bit too chunky which made them off-putting for more than 20 minutes of use.
Now, I’m not saying you can completely pass like you’re wearing normal glasses, but this is pretty much as good as you can get right now. The swappable batteries are a real plus here too in terms of ease of use.
Swappable Battery – A Clever Solution
The GO3’s 270mAh magnetic battery snaps off and on in seconds. The 1,300mAh charging case provides three to four full top-ups, meaning you can run active features like translation and teleprompter for around nine to twelve hours total before needing a wall charge.
Navigation, AI assistant and teleprompter
One of the coolest features I’d like to make use of with smart glasses is maps. With the GO3, this is taken care of pretty well, courtesy of HERE Maps. Things like Google aren’t yet optimised for AR so you are better off using a dedicated provider.
With HERE, navigation is projected turn-by-turn into your line of sight for walking and cycling, and the AI voice assistant handles search and text tasks while you’re moving. That assistant isn’t a total replacement for your phone, but it is useful enough for quick on-the-go queries.
The AI also provides a teleprompter feature which is very cool, and surprisingly handy for a content creator! When in this mode, the GO3 tracks your speaking pace and turns pages for you as you talk. If you skip a section or improvise, it keeps up. The optional INMO Ring4 (which I very much recommend using in tandem) lets you advance slides with your hand in your pocket, invisible to anyone watching. For anyone who presents regularly, that’s a meaningful upgrade over anything involving a visible remote or a phone.
Curious how AI assistants are shaping up across devices? We tested Siri AI hands-on – see our Siri AI first impressions for the full breakdown.
Accessories
Whilst the glasses themselves are very impressive on their own, the experience isn’t nearly as complete or convincing without the accessories. If you’re going to get the GO3, then I’d absolutely recommend spending the extra to get the full package.
Those accessories are the Ring4 and INMO Speaker. The Ring4 enables things like gesture controls so you can much more intuitively control what you see through your glasses. As I said above, this is pretty vital to the whole experience.
The Speaker is less necessary, there to serve the purposes of translation. It is a nice-to-have and makes the translation feature much more effective. If it were me, I’d get them both!
Get the Full Package
The INMO GO3 is impressive alone, but the Ring4 and INMO Speaker accessories significantly improve the experience. The Ring4 adds gesture controls, while the Speaker enables full two-way spoken dialogue translation in 77 languages.
Wrapping up
The GO3 has a bright outdoor display, translation that works in the ways you’d actually use it, a very nifty battery system and it weighs 58g. All of that makes the GO3 a very accomplished and modern-feeling set of smart glasses.
If you want to give smart glasses a fair shot, then I wouldn’t looks much further than these!
2 Comments
The real-time captions and photo translation sound more transformative than another generic AI assistant. At 58g, with a display other people cannot see and batteries that can be swapped instead of stopping the session, these finally seem designed for actual daily use. I’m experimenting with Trellis 2 3D models, so the longer-term prospect of previewing spatial concepts through glasses like these is fascinating, but the practical navigation and accessibility features already make a strong case.
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