Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses Are Getting Two AI Features That Could Change Everything

— Photograph by Raymond Wong

Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses just got a whole lot smarter.

Meta announced in a blog post update that it’s testing out multimodal AI-powered capabilities with the Ray-Ban smart glasses. Simply put, it means you’ll be able to do a lot more practical stuff. And considering Meta and Ray-Ban had built these smart glasses with AI in mind, it makes a lot of sense to push the virtual assistant even further.

The enhanced AI feature isn’t available to the public yet, just to a limited number of customers who opt into this new program. Once it is widely available, don’t be too surprised when you see people ask their sunglasses for fashion advice.

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HEY META, WHAT’S THIS MEAN?

With the upgrades, Meta says the AI assistant on the smart sunglasses can do everything from writing a caption for a photo you just took to identifying an object you’re holding in your hands. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg even demoed the tech by asking it to find a pair of pants to match the striped shirt he pulled out of his wardrobe. Even more practical, Zuckerberg’s post showed the smart glasses translating a meme from Spanish to English. AI has been growing at a fast pace, but the fact that you’ll be only a “Hey Meta” away from understanding something in another language in front of you is wild.

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To show that the AI assistant can understand what it’s looking at, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth asked it to identify a sculpture in the office. Even better, Bosworth said the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses can summarize texts for you.

Beyond the initial capabilities shown in these demos, Meta says it’s working on having Meta AI retrieve real-time info with the help of Bing. This opens up the AI assistant even more since you can ask about anything you’d normally search for, like the next sports event or local restaurant recommendations.

BETA TESTERS WANTED

Meta did say that this was a beta program, so we shouldn’t be surprised if we run into some hitches. The program is currently open to “a small number of people who opt-in,” according to Bosworth, but you can enroll using the Meta View app on iOS or Android. Eventually, Meta plans to release this to all Ray-Ban smart glasses customers in the U.S., with the real-time search feature rolling out in phases.

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