Evan Spiegel doesn't want you to call Snap Specs AI glasses

Snap's newly announced AR Specs might seem similar to other smartglasses, but Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says that's the wrong way to think about the product. Specs, he says, is "a new type of computer, a see-through computer."

Shortly after unveiling Specs at AWE, Spiegel sat down with Engadget to tell us more about the device we got a glimpse of onstage. The CEO repeatedly referred to Specs as a "computer" and that really is core to understanding how Snap is positioning the product (and justifying the price). Specs, Spiegel said, "is able to overlay computing on the world around you and bring computing into the world, which is so important if you want to make computing feel more human."

But Snap will have to do more than just persuade people to buy a computer for their face. When Specs go on sale later this year, the company will face a very different environment than when it first started experimenting with camera-enabled glasses in 2016. For one, it has a lot more competition now. But today, there's also increasing suspicion of smartglasses, given that there have been some very public cases of people misusing the tech.

There's the Meta of it all, too. The company was recently caught with an unreleased facial recognition feature on its Ray-Ban glasses (that it removed soon after outside researchers discovered it).

Spiegel, not surprisingly, isn't a fan of facial recognition.

"There are certain use cases, like facial recognition, that we don't allow in Lenses, and one of the benefits of having our own developer ecosystem and our own developer tools is that we're able to moderate the Lenses that are submitted and available on Snap to make sure that they comply with our guidelines," he told Engadget.

He also said he hopes people will view Specs differently than what's currently out there. "I think AI glasses are typically being used to record content, that's sort of the purpose of the glasses as they're marketed," he said. "That's not the purpose of Specs. In fact, I think that might be an almost tangential use case."

Spiegel said he thinks people will feel more comfortable around Specs once they understand wearers are more likely to be "using a computer, not surreptitiously recording videos."