The trend of major version increments for what may or may not be considered major updates continues for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, with software Version 9.0 available for the platform that’s barely a year old. And this comes about a month after the glasses hit Version 8.0.
In addition to the usual “bug fixes and performance enhancements,” there are a trio of new features of note.
The biggest of the three arguably is the ability to record and send a voice message (or memo, if you prefer) right from the glasses. They can be up to 1 minute long, and you can send them to WhatsApp and Messenger — the two major messaging platforms owned by Meta. You also can tell your glasses to play any voice messages you’ve received by saying, “Hey, Meta, play message,” after you get an announcement that one has been received.
The second big(ish) addition is that you can now set timers hands-free from your glasses. And when a timer’s up, you’ll be notified through the glasses, which makes sense.
And third among the Version 9.0 updates is the ability to share responses from Meta AI to Facebook or Instagram Stories, or to one of your contacts. You’ll use your voice to get this done, too, and you’ll need to have those apps connect to the Meta View app. (It’s nice that Meta doesn’t overstep by doing that automatically, actually.) When you’re interacting with Meta AI — which is pretty much like a chatbot — you can just say, “Hey, Meta, share that,” to share it outside of the Meta View app.
None of that is anywhere near as exciting as what Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg showed off at Meta Connect in late September — so we still have plenty more major updates coming at some point.
