Meta Previews Muse on Its Glasses, but Has No Date for the AI Agent’s Arrival

Meta’s glasses are moving toward a bigger job than answering questions: helping a wearer carry out personal tasks without reaching for a phone. At Meta Connect, the company previewed its Muse AI agent on the glasses and introduced camera-free Ray-Bans, updated camera-equipped models and paid hearing assistance. The agent’s arrival date is still unclear, and the privacy system Meta plans for glasses is not available yet.

A task agent, heard but not seen

Muse is already available on phones and Macs. Meta says connecting it to glasses could help wearers manage habits and calendars by voice. That is a different proposition from asking an assistant for a sports score: the agent can work with personal accounts and take actions through connected services, if the user allows it.

In a brief demo, CNET’s Scott Stein spoke to a Muse agent set up for a fictional marketing executive. It weighed in on a snack and helped rearrange workouts. Stein said some scheduling actions took a while, and the audio-only exchange gave him no progress indicator while Muse worked. He did not test it with his own accounts, so the demo revealed little about how reliably it handles someone’s real calendar or data.

Hearing assistance has its own price

Meta also introduced Hearing Enhancement, an FDA-cleared mode intended for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. A hearing test tunes the feature, which can focus on one person’s voice or work more broadly on nearby sound. Meta charges $149 to activate Hearing Enhancement, with a 30-day free trial. It is also set to be included in a forthcoming Meta One subscription for glasses.

Stein tried the mode during a conversation, with foam earbuds inserted to simulate diminished hearing. He heard greater clarity, but cautioned that this was not a test with someone who has hearing loss. Meta research director Ravish Mehra told him the mode runs for about four hours on recent glasses models and longer on the new audio-only pair. The extra fee therefore buys a feature whose usefulness and runtime a prospective wearer would need to assess.

Two frames, different compromises

The Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses remove the camera but retain speakers, microphones and access to Meta’s assistant. Meta offers Clubmaster and Burbank frames, says the glasses weigh 43 grams and rates them for up to 12 hours on a charge. They start at $349, can be preordered now and are scheduled to ship October 13. Removing the camera rules out photos and video from this pair; it does not make voice interaction disappear.

For people who do want a camera, the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 keeps photo and video capture. Meta says its battery lasts up to nine hours, one hour more than Gen 2, and prices start at $449. The company says a built-in LED signals capture to people nearby. CNET found no major change to how the glasses present that signal, leaving a familiar question for bystanders: whether they will notice a small light on a pair of frames.

The protection is still a plan

Meta says it plans to extend Private Processing to glasses, running AI work in confidential virtual machines in the cloud. That system is not available on the glasses yet. It concerns the handling of data sent for AI processing, a different issue from whether someone nearby knows a camera is recording or a microphone is in use. The distinction grows sharper when an assistant can act on information from connected accounts.

Meta showed another future-facing glasses feature, Holograms, which turns a phone scan of a user’s face into an animated presence for calls. CNET’s Stein tested it on Ray-Ban Displays, but Meta intends to start with a limited WhatsApp beta. Like the Muse demo, it shows where Meta wants the glasses to go—not what every buyer can use today.