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Meta glasses wearers hit with paywall to tap released-in capability
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Owners of Meta's AI glasses have been told they must pay a monthly fee if they want full access to a feature that was previously free.
Key facts
- Meta recently expanded its partnership with the Italian eyewear brand to produce its own line of Meta Glasses, priced from £269 in the UK and $299 in the US
- The company says subscribers to its Meta One Premium tier will be able to use Conversation Focus for up to 15 hours each month
- Users will have to shell out $19.99 every month to use "Conversation Focus", which uses the microphones on the glasses to make it easier to hear people you're talking to, for more than three hours
- Putting Conversation Focus behind a paywall feels wrong," said one user who wrote, external to Meta Ray-Ban product lead David Woodland
Summary
Users will have to shell out $19.99 every month to use "Conversation Focus", which uses the microphones on the glasses to make it easier to hear people you're talking to, for more than three hours a month. Meta says those who hit the "free monthly usage limit" will have to wait for their free hours to refresh each calendar month unless they subscribe. The social media giant declined to provide a statement, but a spokesperson said the move formed part of its experiments with offering subscriptions for some features while keeping core services free. Meta's plans to test "premium" subscription experiments across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were first revealed in January.
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