Meta is adding ridiculous “price caps” and a paywall to its smart glasses

Would you pay $20 a month to access the AI ​​hardware you already own? This appears to be one of Meta’s next bets. This week, it quietly announced that the conversation focus feature in your glasses will soon be limited to three hours of use per month, unless you pay for it. MetaOne Premium subscription is $19.99.

in Help articleThe company insists on this wont Requires a subscription to use your glasses, period; It’s just putting a “rate limit” on some AI features. Even premium subscribers will only get 15 hours of conversational focus per month under this “price cap,” it claims.

The problem is that the maximum Meta price is ridiculous. Conversation focus feature, This amplifies the voice of the person you are talking to So you can hear better in noisy environments, it’s not something that needs to be rate limited, because it doesn’t use Meta servers. He works On the deviceUsing the chips inside the glasses you’ve already purchased. I turned off the internet, and it continues to work.

Here’s how the company introduced it last year: “(C)Conversation Focus uses the open-ear speakers in your AI glasses, 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 servers, but focusing on the conversation technically doesn’t 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 put conversation focus to good use by tapping a button on my phone.

Does Meta have a secret licensing deal with another company that costs them money every time someone uses Conversational Focus? If that fails, the rate cap looks completely bogus.

We asked if Meta could explain the move, and if the company plans to put other on-device features behind the subscription. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.