Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Get AI Boost

Meta is enhancing its Ray-Ban smart glasses with an integrated AI assistant, offering voice-activated information access.

Priced at $300, the glasses feature Meta's conversational AI assistant Meta AI built right into the frame, enabling users to access information with just their voice.

Users can now get responses from the AI via the integrated speaker system by saying "Hey Meta" followed by their query.

By utilizing the Look and Ask AI feature, the glasses offer wearers information about the objects they are observing.This includes translating foreign signs for tourists, however, Meta AI currently only supports English, Spanish, Italian, French and German.

The glasses are available now but its Meta AI features are in beta, limited to its smart glasses users in the U.S. and Canada.

A wider launch of Meta AI for smart glasses is “coming soon,” according to a Meta blog post celebrating 10 years of Reality Labs (formerly Oculus). The company plans to add multimodal AI, “so the glasses can understand what you’re seeing to provide helpful answers.”

During the recent launch of Meta AI for its social media apps, the company stated that it will provide more information on the AI assistant for its smart glasses and its Quest line of virtual reality headsets in the coming weeks.

Related:Meta Launches AI Assistant Across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

Ahead of a wider release CEO Mark Zuckerberg showcased the glasses on Instagram, demonstrating the different voices Meta AI uses to answer questions on a trip to Montana.

Meta AI can also provide information on monuments or buildings the wearer is looking at. In a post on Threads, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth demoed the glasses AI feature, showcasing its ability to provide information on landmarks as he walked around San Francisco. Bosworth was able to use the glasses to generate facts about the Golden Gate Bridge.

Credit: Andrew Bosworth via Threads

Wearers can also command the glasses to share AI interactions and photos through WhatsApp and Messenger. By clicking a button on the top, users can take photos, 1080p videos and live stream. Users can also use the specs to make calls via the built-in microphone.

Meta smart glasses wearers will also be able to control how quickly or slowly their AI assistant talks to them.

Meta and sunglasses maker Ray-Ban initially launched the Stories smart glasses line back in 2021 but that version lacked AI capabilities. The latest version of the glasses lasts for 36 hours of use and are slimmer, smaller and last longer than the previous pair.

The latest iteration also boasts a more powerful 12-megapixel camera, though its field of view is static, allowing wearers to zoom in or out.

Related:Meta’s Quest 3 VR/AR Headset Has Shades of Apple Vision Pro

In addition to the AI features, the new glasses also boast upgraded hardware. Powering the chips is the new Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen1 chip, enabling higher-quality photo and video processing and faster compute.

Users can also customize their glasses with more than 150 different custom frame and lens combinations available.

The Meta AI assistant is powered by Llama 3, Meta’s latest large language model which was trained on a dataset seven times larger than the one used to build Llama 2.