Gadgets Close Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Gadgets Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Tech Meta Close Meta Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Meta Meta is adding ridiculous ‘rate limits’ and a soft paywall to its smart glasses “All AI glasses owners get free monthly usage for certain features.” “All AI glasses owners get free monthly usage for certain features.” by Sean Hollister Close Sean Hollister Senior Editor Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Sean Hollister Jul 1, 2026, 12:51 AM UTC Link Share Gift Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Sean Hollister Close Sean Hollister Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Sean Hollister is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget. Would you pay $20 a month for access to AI hardware you already own? That appears to be one of Meta’s next bets. This week, it quietly announced that your glasses’ Conversation Focus feature will soon be limited to three hours of use per month, unless you pay for a $19.99 Meta One Premium subscription . In a help article , the company insists that it won’t require a subscription to use your glasses, period; it’s merely erecting a “rate limit” for certain AI features. Even premium subscribers will only get 15 hours of Conversation Focus per month under that “rate limit,” it claims. Problem is, Meta’s rate limit is ridiculous. The Conversation Focus feature, which amplifies the voice of the person you’re speaking to so you can hear better in noisy environments, is not something that should plausibly be rate-limited, because it doesn’t use Meta’s servers. It runs on-device , using the chips inside the glasses that you’ve already purchased. I turned off my internet, and it kept working. Meta’s description of “rate limits.” Image: Meta Here’s how the company introduced it last year: “[C]onversation focus uses your AI glasses’ open-ear speakers, beamforming technology, and real-time spatial processing to dynamically amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to.” Not only does it avoid Meta’s servers, but Conversation Focus doesn’t technically require an internet connection at all. I double-checked by turning off my phone’s Wi-Fi and cellular, turning on Airplane Mode, and I was still able to use Conversation Focus just fine by tapping a button on my phone. Does Meta have some secret licensing deal with another company that costs it money every time a person uses Conversation Focus? Failing that, the rate limit sounds utterly bogus. Meta is feeling some financial pressure trying to make AI happen, recently laying off around 10 percent of its entire workforce — around 8,000 people — to help offset its AI investment costs. It also recently managed to make three pairs of AI glasses $80 cheaper by nixing the Ray-Ban name . But perhaps ditching the branding isn’t the only way it plans to subsidize that move. At a time when hardware is getting increasingly expensive, I suppose this isn’t as controversial as Meta quietly beginning to embed a facial recognition upgrade for these glasses in millions of phones, code that it has since quietly removed . Still, I’m filing this under “ Meta will ruin its smart glasses by being Meta .” We’ve asked if Meta can explain the move, and whether the company plans to put other on-device features behind a subscription. Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Sean Hollister Clo
Sumber: The Verge