I Wear Ray-Ban Meta Glasses Every Day, and These Are My Nine Favorite Hidden Features
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I've been wearing Ray-Ban meta glasses for eight months, and I'm still discovering cool things you can do with them. While everyone knows about the much-hyped features like translating languages and using AI to describe what you're seeing, there are plenty of other ways to use these glasses that you might not have thought of. Below are some of my favorites, and one thing you definitely shouldn't do with your Ray-Ban Metas.
Set a timer
This one is the inspiration for this entire post. I can't believe I just realized yesterday that you can say "Hey, Meta, start a timer for five minutes." Once you set a timer, your glasses will keep track of the time, then play an alarm when the time is up. It's a small thing, but when you're in the middle of cooking, it's so convenient.
Stream video on WhatsApp
While I discussed the Ray-Ban Meta's ability to livestream video in my initial review, I wanted to reiterated what an amazing feature this is, and go a little more in-depth about how it works. If you're on a video call through WhatsApp, tap the glasses icon. Then you can double-tap your glasses' capture button, and the view will switch to your glasses camera, so your friend can "see through your eyes." Double-tap again to switch back.
Take a selfie
Your glasses don't power off when you take them off your face, so you can turn them to face yourself, and hit the capture button to take a selfie or a video.
Speak in a celebrity voice
I imagine most people don't change their settings to have Meta speak in the voice of celebrities like John Cena, Awkwafina, or Kristin Bell, because that sounds like the most annoying idea ever, but shockingly, it isn't. Meta's celebrities don't speak "in character," and they sound more natural and human than Meta AI's robotic default voices. Plus, you can't even tell which celebrity they're supposed to be—they're essentially just extra voices.
Connect to a live person
This one is not for the general population, but it's an amazing feature for people with visual impairments. Thanks to Meta's partnership with Be My Eyes, you can use Meta glasses to connect with a sighted volunteer for hands-free visual assistance from a human. You have to sign up and be vetted first, though.
Summarize text
You can ask Meta to summarize any text by saying, "Hey, Meta, look and summarize this," and the AI will give you the gist of whatever you show it, from an email to the pages of a novel. It does a serviceable job, too.
Play a road-trip trivia game
If you're bored on a long drive, you can tell your glasses to "ask you a trivia question." You can also specify categories and ask it to come up with harder or easier questions. But keep in mind, it's an AI, so it isn't always right. (More on that, below.)
Explain the rules of a board game
If you're an audio learner and you have a new board game, you can have Meta explain the rules of the game, or ask it questions like "are slang words allowed in Scrabble?" But keep in mind that AI's sources are basically everything, and it doesn't know the difference between commonly used "house rules" and official rules.
Summarize a book
If you show Meta a book, you can ask it for a summary as well as information on how the book has been received by critics and readers. You can't, sadly, get any information on where you can buy a specific book or what it costs, but you can get an idea of what a book is about and whether it's any good.
Just don't take it too seriously
Like all large language AI models, Meta's AI is often wrong, and it's confident in its mistakes. If you ask Meta's AI to identify a plant, it will answer you, but it might be naming a different plant. If you ask, "what's the chemical symbol of gold?" it will reply "Oh," probably because it's phonetically reading "Au." If you ask it what chord you're playing on a piano, it will always answer "C-major." You get the idea. While Meta's AI will sometimes answer a question with "I can't tell you that," it's a crap shoot, because apparently saying "'m not sure" is a human trait.
Also, don't ask Meta to tell you a joke. It's so not funny.
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