Meta appears to be testing how much users are willing to pay for features powered by hardware they have already bought. The company quietly revealed this week that Conversation Focus, a feature on its AI glasses, will soon be capped at three hours of use per month unless users subscribe to Meta One Premium for $19.99 a month.
In a support article, Meta says it is not making a subscription mandatory to use the glasses overall. Instead, the company frames the change as a “rate limit” on select AI features. Even paying Meta One Premium customers, however, would be limited to 15 hours of Conversation Focus each month under that policy.
The issue is that this particular limit is hard to justify. Conversation Focus is designed to make it easier to hear the person speaking to you in noisy surroundings by amplifying their voice. Crucially, it does not appear to rely on Meta’s cloud infrastructure. The feature runs on-device, using the processors inside the glasses themselves — hardware the customer has already paid for. After turning off internet access, the feature continued to work.
Meta’s own description of the feature, introduced last year, supports that understanding: “[C]onversation focus uses your AI glasses’ open-ear speakers, beamforming technology, and real-time spatial processing to dynamically amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to.”
In other words, Conversation Focus does not just avoid Meta’s servers; it does not seem to require an internet connection at all. After disabling Wi-Fi and cellular data on a phone and switching on Airplane Mode, the feature still worked normally when activated through the phone interface.
That raises an obvious question: is Meta paying some undisclosed licensing fee every time Conversation Focus is used? If there is no such cost or technical dependency, calling this a “rate limit” feels difficult to defend.
We have asked Meta to explain the reasoning behind the change and whether the company intends to place other on-device features behind a subscription in the future. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
