Snap's Specs Intelligence hits iOS preview

Snap is entering the AI assistant race alongside Meta's Muse and Gemini's Spark, but it's positioning Specs Intelligence differently. Rather than waiting for a prompt, the service is designed to anticipate when help would be useful, surfacing decisions before a meeting or gathering flight, hotel, and dinner plans for a trip. It pulls this off by building an understanding of your goals and routines from connected apps, carrying that context across devices.

The assistant launches alongside Specs, Snap's first consumer pair of augmented reality glasses, and on the glasses it can place personal content directly into view, like a daily briefing before work. Under the hood, spokesperson Cassie Bumgarner says it uses a proprietary combination of open-source models hosted in the US alongside local LLMs, a mixture Snap says it updates regularly.

Snap is trying to get ahead of privacy concerns by stating it can't view personal content and won't use connected-account data to train models or serve ads. Still, the body notes the company faces real challenges in getting users to trust it with their information, especially given how unnerving other AI assistants with broad data access have proven. The preview's limits compared to the full early-access experience remain undisclosed.