Meta monetizes Ray-Ban Meta’s offline capabilities

Meta continues to look for new ways to monetize its wearable ecosystem. This time, the company decided to limit access to one of the functions of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, despite the fact that it works completely locally and does not use cloud infrastructure. As The Verge reports, soon some of the device’s capabilities will be available only as part of a paid subscription.

Free use of Conversation Focus will be significantly reduced

According to the publication, Meta is preparing changes according to which the Conversation Focus function will cease to be completely free.

After the update, owners of points without a subscription will be able to use it for no more than three hours per month. To increase the limit, you need to subscribe to Meta One Premium, the cost of which is $19.99 per month. However, even a paid plan does not completely remove the limitation — subscribers will only be able to use 15 hours of usage each month.

In Meta, they emphasize that the restrictions apply only to individual AI capabilities of the device, and not to the operation of the points as a whole. In the company’s documentation, this is called a “rate limit” for some functions.

Why the decision caused criticism

The biggest surprise was the selection of the restricted function.

Conversation Focus is designed to improve the audibility of the interlocutor in a noisy environment. Algorithms analyze the surrounding sounds, highlight human speech and amplify it, allowing you to communicate more comfortably in crowded places.

The main feature is that all processing is done directly on the glasses processor. The function does not require a connection to the Internet, Meta servers or cloud services.

The Verge journalists conducted their own experiment: first they turned off the Internet, then completely switched the smartphone to airplane mode, turning off Wi-Fi and mobile communication. In all cases, Conversation Focus continued to operate without limitations, confirming its fully autonomous architecture.

Previously, Meta itself described the technology as a combination of directional microphones, spatial sound processing and special algorithms for forming an audio beam (beamforming) working directly inside the device.

Limiting the offline function looks more like a business decision

Experts believe that the introduction of the limit is difficult to explain for technical reasons. Since the function does not create a load on the company’s servers and does not require cloud computing, its use practically does not lead to additional costs on the part of Meta.

According to observers, the only logical explanation seems to be the desire to gradually transfer owners of already purchased devices to the regular subscription model.

Some analysts assume the existence of internal licensing agreements that could affect the cost of using the technology, but Meta does not disclose such details.

Company steps up monetization of device ecosystem

The changes come amid massive cost-optimization within Meta. The company previously cut about 10% of its workforce to around 8,000 employees while continuing to invest billions of dollars in artificial intelligence.

At the same time, Meta reduced the cost of several models of its smart glasses at once by about $80, abandoning the Ray-Ban branding in some versions of the devices. Analysts suggest that the company expects to compensate for the decrease in revenues from the sale of equipment due to the subscription model and additional paid features.