Ray-Ban Meta Audio Review: The Best Smart Glasses

I am very lost in Los Angeles. I’m also sweating because I'm running as fast as I can, slapping my hands against the wet glasses frame on my face to boost the volume of the pulsing techno beats blasting into my ears—and anyone else’s if they happen to be nearby. It’s only the second time I’ve gone on a run in the city, and I decide to let myself get completely off course. “Hey Meta,” I pant. “I need to get back; tell me where to go.” The music dims, and the AI agent barks turn-by-turn directions in my ears. After getting turned around a couple of times, I eventually make it back. The navigation wasn’t perfect, but it got me where I needed to be. This feature has long been available in Meta’s smart glasses. But now I’m wearing the new Ray-Ban Meta Audio, camera-free glasses the company announced in September. The only big change between these and Meta’s other glasses is the lack of a camera, but losing that one feature makes a world of difference. It makes sense that Meta started with cameras on its glasses. After all, its primary breadwinner is Facebook, a visual platform driven by all the photographs and memes your uncle can use AI to generate. The platform is designed to capture content and beam it to the world—sometimes whether people like it or not. It took waves of privacy controversies for Meta to finally ditch the cameras. People have found the camera-enabled glasses creepy, calling Meta’s products “pervert glasses” because they have been used by weirdo pickup artists to record people without consent. Some users also shared techniques for removing the indicator light on the glasses designed to let people around the wearer know they’re recording. (Meta released a software fix for this that disables the cameras entirely if the indicator light has been tampered with.) It didn’t help that the company tried to put facial recognition technology on the glasses, which it denied at first, then later admitted to, and removed. In September, the company was sued for its facial recognition systems. (Meta insists that all the very public pushback did nothing to encourage it to release audio-only glasses.)