Ray-Ban Meta Audio Ditches the Camera, Keeps the Mics, and Costs $349

The quickest way to stop people calling your smart glasses creepy is to take out the camera. Meta did that tonight. Ray-Ban Meta Audio, announced at Connect, is Meta's first pair of glasses with no camera at all: speakers, microphones, and an AI assistant in a Ray-Ban frame, starting at $349.

Meta says audio has been the most popular feature on its glasses since day one, and this pair is built around it. At 43 grams, Meta calls them its lightest and slimmest AI glasses yet. They're rated for up to 12 hours of music, podcasts, calls, and assistant use on a charge, plus up to 48 more hours from the included charging case. Pre-orders are open now, and they ship October 13.

Two frames, and a thinner Clubmaster

You get two styles, Clubmaster and Burbank (a plain rectangle), in 23 color and lens combinations, and both work with a wide range of prescriptions. Pulling the camera freed up room in the frame. "Without cameras, this opens up a lot of new design possibilities," Mark Zuckerberg said onstage, and Engadget's Karissa Bell reported that Meta redesigned the internal components for the Clubmaster, which is much thinner than other Ray-Ban Meta frames. Tom's Guide's Scott Younker wore a pair and called them "fairly comfortable."

The new camera-equipped Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 starts at $449 and gets up to nine hours of battery, so the Audio pair lasts three hours longer for $100 less. Tom's Guide counted six microphones, and Meta says they pick up your voice on calls more clearly than earbuds do. "Hey Meta" still works, and you can talk to the assistant hands-free. Meta also announced Muse for its glasses and a $149 Hearing Enhancement feature tonight, but it didn't say when either reaches this pair. Younker said he got conflicting answers on whether Hearing Enhancement will be available on the Audio glasses at launch. Meta's post also gives only a US price for Ray-Ban Meta Audio and doesn't list other countries.

No camera, same microphones

Meta didn't say this pair exists because of privacy. Gizmodo's headline said it for them: "Meta Introduces Audio-Only Smart Glasses to Avoid the 'Perv' Problem." Meta has spent months patching the recording light on its camera glasses. In August it shipped an update that shuts off the camera if someone covers the LED mid-recording, its second LED fix since July, and Zuckerberg spent part of tonight's keynote on the recording light and Meta's work to stop tampering. With Ray-Ban Meta Audio, nobody at the next table has to squint at your frames to figure out whether you're filming them.

That fixes the problem for the people around you. For the wearer, less changes. The microphones still listen for a wake word, and the questions you ask still go to Meta's AI in the cloud. You make the same trade with any earbuds tied to a voice assistant, and it's a smaller worry than a camera. It's still a set of Meta microphones on your face all day, and Meta didn't announce any privacy controls specific to this pair tonight.

Is $349 fair?

Younker put it plainly: "Removing the camera apparently does not make them cheaper." Meta's cheapest pair is now a new Meta Adventurer with a plug-in case at $249 (pre-orders open now, on sale October 23), and Meta Glasses take photos and video. So the pair with no camera costs $100 more than Meta's cheapest camera glasses. You're paying for Ray-Ban frames, the longer battery, and Meta's assistant. Plain audio glasses cost less, too. Amazon's Echo Frames launched at $270 in 2023 with Alexa built in and a rating of 14 hours of moderate use.

Engadget's Devindra Hardawar wrote during the keynote that he's "far more interested in audio only glasses, just for listening to podcasts and audiobooks all day." That's the buyer this pair makes sense for: someone who wants open ears, a long battery, and a voice assistant in frames they'd wear anyway, and who never wanted a camera. If you want photos, Gen 3 costs $100 more. If you only want sound, cheaper audio glasses exist. Ray-Ban Meta Audio sits between them, and it's the first pair of Meta glasses that can't film anyone.