Meta's new Ray-Ban glasses leave out the camera and start at $349

If the thing keeping you away from smart glasses was the camera sitting above your cheekbone, Meta now sells a pair without one. TechCrunch reports that the company announced the Ray-Ban Meta Audio at its Connect 2026 conference on Wednesday, its first camera-free AI glasses, starting at $349 and opening for preorder on October 13.

Audio-only means what it says. You can play music and podcasts, take calls, get speech translated, and talk to Muse, Meta's AI assistant. There is no lens, so there is no photo capture.

Without camera hardware the frames get thinner. They weigh 43 grams, which The Verge compares to roughly 50g for the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 and 69g for the Meta Ray-Ban Display, so this is the lightest thing Meta has put on a face, though still heavier than a plain wire frame. Meta claims up to 12 hours on a charge and up to 48 with the included case. The glasses, designed by Meta's partner EssilorLuxottica, come in 23 color and lens combinations across two new styles, a retro Ray-Ban "Clubmaster" and "Burbank."

"Once you get used to high-quality audio, it's just a thing that you want all the time, right?" Mark Zuckerberg said during the keynote.

The camera glasses got a refresh at the same time. The Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 3) carries a 12 MP camera with 3K Ultra HD video, a six-mic array and up to nine hours of battery. It also gets more expensive: $449, up from $379 for the second generation last year, according to The Verge. Hearing assistance is a $149 add-on, and The Verge was told it is a one-time fee rather than a subscription, and FSA/HSA eligible.

Alex Himel, Meta's vice president of wearables, told The Verge that the audio-only glasses have been years in the making, and that three years ago it wasn't clear AI glasses were going to be a thing at all, back when every other company was backing out of the space. Meta now expects over 100 versions of its glasses by the end of the year. A brand partnership with singer Lisa follows the earlier one with Kylie Jenner.

On privacy, Himel says the audio-only glasses don't record and only listen for a wake word. Meta also teased "private processing," which it claims stops the company from seeing your data. The Verge describes it as the same server-based pipeline used on WhatsApp, where a user's data is inaccessible to Meta or third parties when end-to-end encryption isn't possible or on-device processing isn't powerful enough.

Separately, the visual-data opt-out has begun rolling out. Engadget reports that smart glasses users can now refuse to let Meta use "visual data" collected by the device for AI training, and that Meta says opting out means the data isn't stored after processing. Audio-only queries are still used for training.

There is a cost to switching it off. Meta says opting out may block certain features, including visual reminders, the trick where you look at an object and ask Meta AI to remind you to buy it next week. Visual data that does get used may be reviewed automatically or by a human as part of training and improving the models. Photos and videos you capture while the capture LED is on don't count as visual data, per Meta.