GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Remember when Meta was planning to charge a $20 monthly subscription fee for the smart glasses feature that lets people hear each other more clearly — even though that feature runs locally on your glasses and doesn’t require the cloud? Meta has paused those plans, spokesperson Tyler Yee confirms to The Verge.
The company is not giving up on the idea of a subscription fee for certain features — that’s still moving forward. Yee confirms that “some premium features will be subscription-based over time.”
But Conversation Focus, the accessibility feature, “will remain available for free through our Early Access Program for early testers while we work on a better approach.”
Here’s one of the company’s statements to The Verge:
Meta’s AI glasses pack a lot of value for free, and some premium features will be subscription-based over time—and conversation focus is one we want to make sure we get right. We heard the feedback so we’re pausing its subscription test for now. Conversation focus will remain available for free through our Early Access Program for early testers while we work on a better approach.
The most ridiculous part of Meta’s original plan was the “rate limits.” Meta made it sound like it needed to charge a subscription for Conversation Focus because running that service had an incremental cost, to the point that even paid subscribers would only get 15 hours of Conversation Focus per month. That was easy to disprove: When I disconnected my own Meta Ray-Bans from the internet, the feature kept on working.
But Meta isn’t actually promising to abandon those “rate limits.”
I asked: “Given that Conversation Focus is on-device and Meta understands the backlash, is the thinking that it will no longer be rate-limited?”
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