Leion Hey 2 AR translation glasses review

Well, what I can tell you is that both Meta and LLVision arrived at completely different answers.

The Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses feel more like an extension of your smartphone. They’re broader, more lifestyle-oriented and quite frankly far more versatile overall. You can use them for taking photos and videos, listening to music, handling calls, livestreaming, AI queries and general day-to-day convenience. Even outside of the AI features, they already function fairly well as wearable audio glasses. That versatility alone makes glasses like this easier to justify as an everyday gadget.

The Hey 2, on the other hand, feels much narrower in purpose. Translation is its entire existence here. Almost everything about the glasses revolves around removing barriers from multilingual conversations and because of that, the Hey 2 ends up feeling less like a lifestyle gadget and more like a specialised tool.

This, in turn, also means the value proposition of the Hey 2 becomes a bit more complicated when it’s priced at US$549 (est. S$705 based on today’s exchange rate). Because if I’m being realistic, I think most people would probably get more practical day-to-day value out of the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses. If you don’t have to deal with regular translations, the Hey 2’s usefulness drops pretty quickly.

Comfort is another interesting difference that I’ve noted between the two. The Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses still feel closer to normal eyewear overall – it is a Ray-Ban after all. While both the Hey 2 and the Scriber Optics (S$699) variant of the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 that I tested come in at 49g, the latter seems to have a better weight distribution around the entire frame. With the Hey 2 on the other hand, I found that the temples gradually started pressing uncomfortably into the area above my ears after longer sessions. It’s not noticeable at first, but after a couple of hours wearing it, the pressure becomes pretty acute – for me at least.

But at the same time, the Hey 2 also avoids some of the social awkwardness surrounding Meta’s glasses.

And that’s entirely because LLVision chose not to include a camera at all. Initially, that sounded like a missing feature to me. But after wearing them around outside, I actually think it’s one of the smartest decisions they made. The absence of a camera makes the Hey 2 feel noticeably less invasive than the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, especially in social situations where people might not appreciate being potentially recorded.

That said, the translation results aren’t always perfect. While the Hey 2’s translations are accurate enough to keep conversations flowing naturally, every now and then, the AI confidently spits out something that feels slightly off. I had one moment where a casual sentence about lunch somehow became dramatically more serious than intended. Another conversation transformed a fairly harmless phrase into something that sounded weirdly confrontational.

Thankfully, nobody got offended. But those moments immediately remind you that AI translation still isn’t perfect. So after awhile, you stop treating the subtitles as absolute truth and start treating them more like conversational assistance, which is still incredibly useful, by the way.

Battery life and subscription

Battery life is decent enough for practical use. LLVision claims around six to eight hours of continuous translation, with the charging case stretching that much further. That pretty much mirrors my experience with it, though it’s worth noting that the Hey 2 itself lacks built-in cellular connectivity or offline translation. They must be tethered to your smartphone via Bluetooth to function.

This means that everytime it translates something, it’s eating up your data plan (or worse, your data roaming when overseas) as well as impacting your smartphone’s battery life.

The bigger issue for me is how dependent the Hey 2 still feels on data connectivity and subscription services. I understand why this exists. Real-time AI processing costs money. Translation models aren’t cheap to run. But the moment you start thinking about subscription minutes, connectivity or roaming data charges, the glasses starts to feel a little less attractive to me.

That’s especially true once you start digging into LLVision’s “Pro Translation Access” system. While the glasses support basic translation features out of the box, the more advanced multilingual translation features rely on prepaid translation minutes tied to LLVision’s cloud services. Pro Translation starts from 120 minutes for US$9.90 and up to US$199.90 for 6,000 minutes. I wouldn’t consider these prices as affordable, and once you realise that those minutes are essentially the backbone of the Hey 2’s core functionality, you start becoming a bit more conscious about how often you’re actually using the glasses.

Final thoughts

Still, despite all those caveats, I ended up liking the Leion Hey 2 more than I expected to. Because when the glasses work well, the experience is genuinely good. And honestly, unlike a lot of AI gadgets today that still feel like tech demos searching for a purpose, the Leion Hey 2 solves a very real problem in a way that truly feels intuitive.

There are big caveats though.

Compared to the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses, the Hey 2 feels much narrower in purpose and harder to justify as an everyday wearable. The comfort still needs refinement, the glasses remain heavily dependent on smartphone tethering and data connectivity, and the whole Pro Translation subscription system introduces a barrier of entry for long-term usage. But as an early glimpse into where smart glasses could realistically become useful beyond taking photos or showing notifications, I think LLVision might actually be onto something here.

The Leion Hey 2 AR translation glasses are now available at Leion’s e-store for US$549. Click here to buy.