Conversation Focus, which amplifies the voice of the person the wearer is talking to, is now capped at roughly 3 hours per month on the free tier and 15 hours for Meta One Premium subscribers at $19.99 a month, and the feature still works with the internet turned off.
Meta is asking owners of its Ray-Ban smart glasses to pay $19.99 a month to unlock more than three hours of a feature that runs entirely on the glasses they already own. A Verge reporter confirmed the feature still works with the internet turned off.
The feature in question is called Conversation Focus. It uses the glasses' open-ear speakers, beamforming, and real-time spatial processing to amplify the voice of the person a wearer is talking to. Meta introduced it in the v21 software update shipped earlier in 2026, alongside Spotify integration and broader Meta AI improvements, according to the company's own v21 release post.
The new ceiling is roughly three hours per month on the free tier and roughly fifteen hours per month for Meta One Premium subscribers at $19.99 a month, according to The Verge, which read the numbers off Meta's own help center. The Verge's reporter also flipped the glasses into Airplane Mode and confirmed Conversation Focus still worked, because the processing happens on the device's own chips rather than on Meta's servers.
That detail reframes the whole pricing question. When a feature works without contacting a company's servers, the buyer of the hardware is not paying for compute, storage, or a cloud service. They are paying to unlock capability that physically lives in the device on their face. Meta's help center frames the cap in "rate limit" terms, according to The Verge, but functionally it is a soft paywall on owned hardware.
The cap lands as Meta is pushing harder into subscriptions across its consumer apps. Meta One launched in May 2026 as a bundle that covers Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and a growing set of AI features, with AI-only plans starting at $7.99 per month, per TechCrunch. Putting a meter on a hardware-resident feature slots cleanly into that strategy, even if the help-center wording tries to soften it.
Meta is also cutting costs around the same push. The company laid off roughly 10 percent of its workforce, around 8,000 people, in 2026 to help offset AI investment, according to The Verge. And earlier it dropped the Ray-Ban name from three pairs of its AI glasses, cutting the price by $80 and pitching the move as a brand simplification. The combined picture is a consumer hardware business being asked to do more subscription work at a time when Meta is trimming payroll elsewhere.
For a glasses owner, the practical decision is narrow. If three hours of Conversation Focus a month is enough, the free tier still works in airplane mode and the device still does what it advertised at the register. If it is not, the upgrade costs more than a typical streaming subscription, and the company collecting the money never sees a single packet of audio from the glasses while the feature runs.