Meta AI Glasses lock offline feature behind expensive subscription

Anyone who wants to use all the features of smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 ($379 on Amazon) will need to sign up for a Meta One Premium subscription, which costs $19.99 per month. This is because Meta has announced a so-called "throughput rate limit" – a monthly usage cap for certain features that can be very short without a paid subscription.

The first feature to be restricted is conversation focus. This feature makes the voice of the person the Meta glasses wearer is talking to louder and thus easier to understand. Without a subscription, this feature will only be available for three hours per month in the future, and even with a subscription, usage will be limited to 15 hours per month. As The Verge notes, conversation focus is processed locally on the glasses and works even without an internet connection.

Meta is therefore not requiring the paid subscription to cover server costs, but is locking a feature behind a subscription wall that the hardware can handle on its own. It’s also frustrating that there’s no way to see how many hours remain until the end of the current month, and that unused hours cannot be carried over to the next month. It remains to be seen whether additional features of the Meta AI Glasses will be available exclusively to paying subscribers in the future. As Meta focuses increasingly on subscriptions, that wouldn’t be surprising.