Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are already one of the best cracks at AI hardware to date. Now, Meta is pushing out a series of software updates, along with a new transparent Ray-Ban style, that bring the smart glasses closer to actually feeling smart.
The company announced several updates to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses at its Connect conference on Wednesday, introducing new features like “Reminders,” which has the glasses take a photo of what you’re looking at and remind you about it later through a notification on your phone. You’ll also be able to scan QR codes and call phone numbers you’re looking at directly from the glasses.
The Meta Ray-Bans can already translate a handful of languages from still images. Now, the company says it’s working on a real-time language translation feature that will play back what you’re hearing in real time via speakers in the glasses. When this feature is made available in the coming months, it will be able to translate between English, French, Italian, and Spanish.
I got to test out the new updates firsthand, and the improvements in AI were clear. Back in July, when I first tried the Ray-Ban Metas, the AI often struggled — it couldn’t even set a simple timer or reliably identify objects. This time, however, the glasses accurately recognized everything I asked and were also far more responsive, handling follow-up questions with ease. However, there’s still no timer, which feels like a big miss to me.
A Meta product lead in the demo booth said that the goal of this update was to make conversations with the glasses feel more natural, and to his point, I did find this version of the AI more useful. The company also plans to add the ability for the Ray-Bans’ AI to support real-time video processing so it can immediately understand what’s around you — that feature isn’t coming until later this year, though.
Alongside the software updates, Meta is also releasing a new range of transition lenses with Ray-Ban’s parent company, EssilorLuxottica. There are also new clear frames that reveal all the tech inside, reminiscent of an old-school Game Boy Color. At the demo booth, I got to see Li-Chen Miller, head of wearables at Meta, sporting a pair.
AI-powered devices have had a particularly rough year. Humane’s AI-powered Pin struggled with poor sales, and the Rabbit R1 faced terrible reviews. While Meta hasn’t released sales figures, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors the smart glasses have exceeded expectations, leading EssilorLuxottica to ramp up production to meet high demand. According to estimates from IDC, Meta has shipped more than 700,000 pairs, with orders more than doubling from the first to the second quarter of this year.
It seems like Zuckerberg has high hopes for smart glasses. “I think Meta AI is becoming a more and more prominent feature of the glasses, and there’s more stuff that you can do,” he said in an interview with The Verge’s Alex Heath this week. “It’s not like we’re going to throw away our phones, but I think what’s going to happen is that, slowly, we’re just going to start doing more things with our glasses and leaving our phones in our pockets more.”
Whether these glasses will truly change how we interact with AI remains to be seen, but Meta’s latest updates show a clear path toward making AI assistants on your face a practical reality.
