After months of waiting the moment is here: Meta AI features have arrived on the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses for everyone – well, everyone in the US and Canada, for now.
The exclusivity to those regions is not the only caveat unfortunately. Another big one is that while the Meta AI tools are no longer locked behind an exclusive beta, Meta notes in its blog post announcement that they are still beta features – suggesting that you’ll likely run into several problems with regard to reliability and accuracy.
But while the update isn’t quite as complete as we’d have liked, it’s still a major leap forward for Meta’s smart glasses – finally having them deliver on the impressive AI promises Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made when they were revealed back at Meta Connect 2023 in September last year.
The main Meta AI feature you’ll want to take advantage of is ‘Look and Ask.’ To activate it simply start a phrase with “Hey Meta, look and …” then ask the glasses a question about something you can see.
You could try “… tell me about this animal,” or “…tell me about this building,” or even “…tell me what I can make for dinner with these ingredients.”
The glasses will then use your command alongside an image captured by the camera to search for an answer in its database – which include data the Meta AI has been trained on, and information it has gathered from Google and Bing.
As with all AI responses, we’d recommend taking what the Meta AI says with a pinch of salt. AI assistants are prone to hallucinating – which in the AI context you can read simply as “getting stuff completely wrong” – and this Meta model is no different. It will get stuff right too, but don’t take its advice as gospel.
Beyond Look and Ask you can use the Meta AI assistant like the Google or Siri assistant on your phone. This means starting video calls (above), sending texts and images, or playing music all with just voice commands.
Just be prepared to get some attention as you walk around talking to your smart glasses – we got some odd looks when we were testing a different pair of specs the other day.