Great stereo, poor secretary: Spending 48 hours with Meta’s AI sunglasses

SINGAPORE – I recently found myself tromping to the gym at night with sunglasses on.

No right-thinking member of society should admit to this – unless like Anna Wintour, one’s personal brand is bound up in a permanent darkening of vision. But in my defence, my shades were also playing music.

I have been test-driving Meta’s Gen 2 AI glasses ($629 to $759), which launch here on April 20 in partnership with Franco-Italian eyewear giant and owner of Ray-Ban, EssilorLuxottica.

Among the five Ray-Ban designs available – two of which are prescription glasses slated for a May 6 release – my pair takes the form of Wayfarers, the cult style popularised in the 1980s and blessedly more fashion than cyborgian.

The models, first released in the United States in September 2025, are fitted with the latest updates: eight hours of battery life – up from Gen 1’s four – a 12MP camera that can take 3K photos and videos, Live AI and immersive audio upgrades.

For two days, I wear the frames to meet friends and on work assignments.

In the privacy of my room, I attempt banter with its integrated AI assistant, whose voice I change from American ex-wrestler John Cena’s to English actress Judi Dench’s in my too-serious project of cultivating friendship with a robot. This has the winsome effect of suffusing our interactions with the faint air of Shakespearean sci-fi, but that is by the by.

Meta’s pitch is that smart glasses remove friction between the physical and digital worlds, hooking one up to both simultaneously. Through voice commands, messages can be read, phone calls made and questions searched up all while the wearer has his or her hands free and eyes up.

It is tech promising greater engagement with the world, presumably by reducing phone use – a premise so chic, more than seven million pairs across both iterations were sold globally in 2025, according to EssilorLuxottica’s Q4 2025 earnings report.

But do the glasses live up to it?

Fun conversation starter

Unless I told them, most people had no idea I had a computer on my nose. Judi Dench is inaudible to those around me, speaking through invisible speakers that seem to emit sound straight into my head.

This leads to much shock at dinner with my friends when I announce I have just taken a picture of them, a reaction that quickly morphs into nervous curiosity. I pass the glasses around and everyone has his or her fun with the in-built camera, which sends pictures and videos straight to my phone through the Meta AI app.

Later, my friend asks if I could please delete the video he took of his nipples. Another asks John (this was pre-Judi) to “judge whether the person in front of me is ugly by societal standards”. Realising how funny my friends are is probably the best by-product of my new toy.

So far, so social. But none of the pictures turns out well, held back by the natural movements of the head after one or two highballs and the jitters of handling a potentially voyeuristic weapon.

Though still a fringe product, the possibility of covertly filming others in public has already become a talking point – prompting Meta to increase the brightness of the LED light that blinks when filming is in progress.

My unobtrusive camera is startlingly reliable, workable by voice command or a capture button on the right arm of the glasses. It does not fail once in two days.

The next day, my phone nearly dies while I am out reporting and I shiftily resort to using my eyewear to take pictures of what I need to remember, cautious to keep people out of frame.

I use the audio function with a lot more pleasure. The glasses connect to Apple Music and Spotify, which first have to be open on the phone. The sound is glorious. Unlike headphones, the notes do not seem to spill into my ears so much as skirt the crust of my mind, then pour into the core.

I like this so much, I take to wearing my glasses even at night. On the train, I fantasise about gifting a pair to every uncivic, Douyin-addicted uncle I encounter.

Calling and texting challenges

Calling people and sending texts through my glasses are much less euphoric. These basic functions are often fumbled, especially when I try to reach people with non-English names. I successfully call my friend Colette, but cannot for the life of me set up an appointment over WhatsApp with my Vietnamese hairdresser.

My cortisol spikes a couple of times when Judi mishears me (often) and drafts messages to ex-classmates I have not spoken to in years. “Would you like to send ‘Stop, noooo’ to Lim Jia Hui?” Thankfully, no former boyfriends were harmed in the making of this review.

One night, I entertain the idea of engineering an encounter with a French or Spanish speaker to test Meta’s live translation function. I opt out of going to expatriate haunt Skinny’s Lounge at Boat Quay in favour of a French New Wave film.

Judi bombs, turning most of the dialogue of crime drama A Bout De Souffle (1960) into gibberish, though she gets much of leading man Jean-Paul Belmondo’s famous line straight.

“If you don’t like the sea... or the mountains... or the big city – then get f***ed!” becomes “If you don’t like the sea... or the mountains... if you don’t like life”, which omits the profanity while eerily striking on a truer essence.

It is a lot more accurate in a Mandarin conversation with a Chinese reporter.

As an in-ear encyclopaedia, Judi is cancellable. Standing in front of Tang Plaza, I ask her to tell me what I am looking at. “The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Singapore,” she says. “Are you exploring the area?”

But as a second “brain”, she is passable, successfully remembering the price of a pair of pants after I show her the price tag. I test her 12 hours later, by which time I have forgotten the correct answer, though I had made a mental note of it. I brood on the mass cognitive decline that AI has opened the door to, then thank Judi.

In our “chats”, she is commendably professional, always redirecting me to friends or a trusted professional when I half-seriously confess to melancholic thoughts.

Since she keeps me at a remove, I feel I can say: It is a relief to return to my iPhone. In fact, I had hardly been separated from it. The pair of glasses is so hit-or-miss in its functions or slow to work that I repeatedly fall back on just using my phone – undercutting the product’s hands-free pitch.

To be fair, Meta AI glasses have powers of recall and nearly-there communication abilities that will be a boon to the low-vision community. But in most cases, it does less than what a phone can in double the time.

Perhaps the tech is still in the lab, yet even perfected, I suspect it would still feel superfluous – nice but non-essential.

So, so long Judi, and thank you for the music.

Info: Available in all Ray-Ban stores, EssilorLuxottica retail locations including Sunglass Hut, and optical retail partner stores across Singapore.