Watch out, Meta. I tried Alibaba’s Qwen smart glasses and they are very impressive

These AI-driven smart glasses are now available in China but will roll out internationally later this year.

Katie Collins Main writer

Katie is a UK-based journalist and features editor. Officially, she is CNET’s European correspondent, covering technology policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she is Taylor Swift’s correspondent on CNET. You can also find his writings on technology for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described as a “living synthesizer” by London’s Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.

Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress may be a European tech show, but in recent years the event has been largely dominated by Chinese phone companies such as Xiaomi and Honor. This year, they were joined by tech giant Alibaba, which launched its Qwen smart glasses at the show – and after trying them out, all I have to say is that Meta should watch its back.

The Qwen Glasses are among the first wearables Alibaba is building on top of its Qwen AI family of big-language models, and the company showed off two different models at MWC.

The first pair, the Qwen S1 spec, has a waveguide head-up display etched into the lenses and serves as a rival to Meta’s Ray-Ban Display model (without the gesture control). My first impression of these AR glasses was that they were lightweight and comfortable to wear. I wouldn’t have known they were smart glasses just because of their weight. At the end of each arm are replaceable batteries, which detach easily so you can keep the glasses running longer when you’re on the go.

I activated the glasses with the phrase “Hey Qwennie,” which it picked up with its five microphones. I then asked it to perform a series of basic tasks, including asking the device to take a photo and telling me what I was looking at when I held a photo of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia in front of my face.

I could see a miniature version of the photo I’d captured on the green screen, and the glasses were able to respond to my architectural query both by displaying text on the heads-up display and through bone conduction built into the S1’s arms. But perhaps my favorite feature was the step-by-step instructions. This feature seemed like it could become essential for navigating a busy city and much more convenient than using a phone or smartwatch.

I also tried the teleprompter feature, which scrolled while I read aloud the text appearing on the screen, but I must confess that I didn’t find it as easy to follow as a similar demo I tried earlier in the week on the MemoMind One glasses. With booth attendant Qwen speaking to me in Chinese, I was able to simultaneously see and hear the English translation of her words on the screen and in my ear, although there was enough of a delay to prevent our communication from being entirely smooth.

The second pair of glasses Alibaba showed off at the show were the Qwen G1 glasses, lacking the heads-up display found on the S1, but otherwise offering much the same functionality thanks to microphones, cameras, and bone conduction.

Overall, I was impressed with the look, feel, sound quality, and capabilities of these glasses, which for many people might be their first introduction to Alibaba’s Qwen AI (via the Qwen app, built into the specs). In China, where pre-orders for the glasses are already underway, people wearing the glasses will be able to carry out tasks such as ordering food or calling a taxi hands-free.

Alibaba said pricing for the G1 glasses would start at around $275 (for comparison, Meta’s Ray-Ban Gen 2 glasses cost $379), but did not say how much the more advanced S1 glasses would cost. Official sales in China will begin on March 8, with Alibaba promising an international rollout including integration with popular global services planned for an unspecified date later in 2026.