Meta Upgrades Ray-Ban Stories Smart Glasses with AR Transition Lenses, More Voice Assistant Languages

Meta is rolling out upgrades to the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses introduced last fall, including improvements to the built-in voice assistant. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the updates on his Facebook account, though the official purchase page for the Stories has yet to reflect what he mentioned.

Stories Software

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The updated Ray-Ban Stories updates will introduce augmented reality (AR) transition lenses to the glasses, so they can be worn even indoors or when it’s not sunny. Wearers can also now record up to 60 seconds of video, double the length from before. The glasses will also ship to new countries in Europe including Austria, Belgium, France, and Spain. Accordingly, the voice assistant for the Stories will now speak French and Italian, not just English. The three models of Stories are still all under the Ray-Ban branding, with Meta’s role strictly technological. The device is paired with the Facebook View app for recording videos and pictures and the Facebook Assistant runs the glasses by voice The $300 price tag also remains the same.

Though Zuckerberg didn’t specifically cite some of the other voice AI projects Meta is working on, there’s some obvious potential connection to the Stories. For instance, the company’s new Project CAIRaoke is a conversational AI model designed to make talking to digital assistants more natural, which would be a boon for those wearing the Stories. There’s also the Project Cambria headset and Nazare AR smart glasses Meta introduced during an event last year that would benefit from better conversational AI. Nazare in particular is designed to fo daily interaction with digital assistants. Whether the research on internal projects will extend to the Ray-Ban partnership isn’t clear, but certainly would be logical.

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