TL;DR: you now need to pay a $20/month “meta premium” subscription to use a 100% offline feature that runs on your own malware-ridden smartglasses.
If you don’t subscribe, you can use the feature that is already included in the hardware that you already paid for 3 hours each month
The now-paywalled feature boosts the voice of the speaker in front of you, something that even low-end ANC earphones are doing now. 5 minutes of free usage per day is basically nothing.
That means by simply connecting them to the internet you’re generating around $20/month for Meta. Now how would they do that? :)
Delete Delete Delete
Lol. Ok.
good! why is anyone using these anyway?
Non-paywalled: https://archive.ph/vGVor
Complete Article:
Would you pay $20 a month for access to AI hardware you already own? That appears to be one of Meta’s next bets. This week, it quietly announced that your glasses’ Conversation Focus feature will soon be limited to three hours of use per month, unless you pay for a $19.99 Meta One Premium subscription.In a help article, the company insists that it won’t require a subscription to use your glasses, period; it’s merely erecting a “rate limit” for certain AI features. Even premium subscribers will only get 15 hours of Conversation Focus per month under that “rate limit,” it claims.
Problem is, Meta’s rate limit is ridiculous. The Conversation Focus feature, which amplifies the voice of the person you’re speaking to so you can hear better in noisy environments, is not something that should plausibly be rate-limited, because it doesn’t use Meta’s servers. It runs on-device, using the chips inside the glasses that you’ve already purchased. I turned off my internet, and it kept working.
Meta’s description of “rate limits.”
Meta’s description of “rate limits.” Image: MetaHere’s how the company introduced it last year: “[C]onversation focus uses your AI glasses’ open-ear speakers, beamforming technology, and real-time spatial processing to dynamically amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to.”
Not only does it avoid Meta’s servers, but Conversation Focus doesn’t technically require an internet connection at all. I double-checked by turning off my phone’s Wi-Fi and cellular, turning on Airplane Mode, and I was still able to use Conversation Focus just fine by tapping a button on my phone.
Does Meta have some secret licensing deal with another company that costs it money every time a person uses Conversation Focus? Failing that, the rate limit sounds utterly bogus.
Meta is feeling some financial pressure trying to make AI happen, recently laying off around 10 percent of its entire workforce — around 8,000 people — to help offset its AI investment costs. It also recently managed to make three pairs of AI glasses $80 cheaper by nixing the Ray-Ban name. But perhaps ditching the branding isn’t the only way it plans to subsidize that move.
At a time when hardware is getting increasingly expensive, I suppose this isn’t as controversial as Meta quietly beginning to embed a facial recognition upgrade for these glasses in millions of phones, code that it has since quietly removed. Still, I’m filing this under “Meta will ruin its smart glasses by being Meta.”
We asked Meta if it could explain the move and whether the company plans to put other on-device features behind a subscription. Meta did not reply to those questions, but it did reach out to make it even clearer that the subscription is optional. “Most people will use Conversation Focus without hitting the monthly limit. The subscription is for power users who want expanded access and additional benefits like premium device support,” Meta spokesperson Tyler Yee tells The Verge.
“Out of the box, you’ll get core AI features like voice assistant, live translation, look and ask, and more. The subscription simply unlocks more access and more powerful features on your AI glasses. Currently, this only includes expanded access to Conversation Focus and premium device support.”
That “currently” does make it sound like Meta might put more features into a subscription bucket, but it also sounds like a few features will stay out of it.
quietly announced
We’re hitting new lows.
Putting the moron in oxymoron here
I don’t mind if the people who wear these get ripped off
something that even low-end ANC earphones are doing
Because God forbid you take the fucking earbuds out of your head when talking to someone.
They use the fact that they have multiple microphones and some audio processing to isolate the voice of the person from the background noise. Taking your earbuds out would make it harder to hear them, not easier.
In noisy areas (like a bar) it can be the difference between being able to understand the person you’re with and being deafened by the background noise.
It’s all done on your device so it makes zero sense that they would charge a subscription other than as a means of financial extortion to use the hardware that you paid for.
This. Honestly they’re amazing on airplanes, since you can still talk and hear all the announcements / flight attendants without the background noise.
Maybe its just me, but nowadays every public apace is incredibly noisey.
Every bar and restaurant is blaring music. Vehicular traffic, air conditions, all sorts of other machines are pumping noise in too.
I just went out with some people this weekend and found myself wishing we had, noise-canceling headsets to be able to talk to each other. Kinda makes me want to not go out any more.
When did these come out? Wow, that was a steep enshitification slope.
Finding ways to make an awful product even worse.
people who vouched with their money for these asshole companies seriously had it coming. they are the lords of enshittification
So they’re killing their product before it even launches
My mom just caught one of her kids using these to cheat on a final. He had them Bluetoothed to his laptop and it disconnected at some point and she heard “the answer to number 7 is…” But she said he barely got a C on it even while cheating. So since she didn’t know about the glasses until after that student left and another student told her it was the glasses, she just kinda let it go saying “it’s honestly going to be his problem in the future.”
Eh, I cheated off my apple watch in highschool, didn’t make me stupider, I didn’t cheat in college becaue I was too scared to get caught lol.
College was the only time I tried. It was during a lab practical for a higher level immunology. But I looked at another answer of theirs that I knew, and it was not the right answer. So I didn’t use the first.
I had notes on my apple watch, be desperately zooming in and out
yeah, i tutored a fair amount of pre-med students who had to take economics as a general education class. dullards to the last one (these were the ones who needed a tutor for introductory economics) and every single one tried to pay me to do their homework. i kept their names and about half are now working in medicine, because “that’ll be their problem” turns into “that’ll be the patient’s problem”.
please remind your mother that if y’all keep failing them through, look what happens
I mean, it was a bio 2xxx class so likely a gen ed req. She would’ve failed him if she knew who it was at the time. She told me she was “seeing red”. But like I said, the student was one of the first to finish and leave so it would’ve been difficult to make a case.
I’m not a teacher, but I dunno if that’s the right response to someone cheating. It is going to be his problem in the future, but as a teacher, isn’t it her job to teach the kid that that’s not OK? Sorta depends on the age, I suppose, but I’d definitely give the kid a 0% instead of a C.
Morality and such isn’t really a teacher’s job.
Besides that, “between no kid left behind” and government testing standards that are tied into funding, teaching a turned into a generic lump of shit, and everyone gets to pass.
It isn’t really an issue of morality imo, it’s a teacher’s job to give grades that reflect the student’s skill level.
Excuse me, with how shitty parents are, someone has to step up, or we are all screwed.
Let’s put aside who’s job is what, these kids are going to be building our future too.
The parents will raise hell and admin will pressure you to look the other way since the last thing they want is their stats looking bad. There’s a reason teachers are quitting in droves. You couldn’t pay me enough to be one.
I mean, they really won’t, since the old people are the ones who always vote. I’ll be dead by the time any of today’s school kids are in charge of anything and the teacher lesson plans, or no kids left behind are going away any time soon. if you can’t teach your own children a sense of morality, you don’t even deserve to have a say in this discussion.
You know, if the kid is using state of the art tech to cheat and he still only got a C, then maybe let this one go.
Maybe this kid needs all the help he can get.Teaching someone that cheating is a way to get a pass vs a fail isn’t helping anyone, in my opinion, but it could be situational.
She couldn’t really have done anything considering she didn’t know which kid it was until after they were gone and the other student informed her.
Ahh, that makes a bit more sense I suppose. Innocent until proved guilty and whatnot. I feel like I’d still want to bring them in to confront them about it, to let them know that they didn’t really get away with it. Also, obviously, I’d be banning smart glasses from tests.
She’s visiting for a funeral and I commented something on the commercial for them, and she told me that sorry and about how she has to watch out for them now. Another loose relation is visiting and a teacher as well and I asked them about ai and got two totally different experiences. My mom’s class doesn’t require a lot of literature as it’s a low level bio class, but the loose family is teaching English to troubled youth and sees it absolutely everywhere. She started having them write one paper first day in class to get a feel for their actual writing aptitude.
Interesting insight of course. I can’t imagine being a teacher right now, having to keep up with these things. You’re basically forced to become a techie in some ways, when before, many teachers really had no reason or need to learn tech stuff. I guess they had other cheating methods to keep up with, but man, these cheating tools are just evolving so fast these days.
Man I can’t wait to see the first rube that pays 20$ a month for me to completely dismiss their existence.
People already pay these fees for everything from heated seats in their cars to online storage because their locked down garbage mobile OSes won’t let them mount remote directories directly to their file system.
People are terrible at technological freedom and worse at tolerating even minor inconveniences to secure any kind of rights. This shouldn’t even be SLIGHTLY surprising to someone in 2026. We’re reaching the point where someone is going to make breathable air a monthly subscription fee.
Thanks to Meta for clearly showing me what not to buy 😃
