Ray-Ban Meta glasses arrive in version 9.0 and benefit from new voice messaging

The trend of major version increments for what may or may not be considered major updates continues for Ray-Ban Meta glasses, with version 9.0 of the software available for the platform which is barely a year old. And this comes about a month after the glasses reached version 8.0.

In addition to the usual “bug fixes and performance improvements,” there are a trio of noteworthy new features.

Perhaps the most important of the three is the ability to record and send a voice message (or memo, if you prefer) directly from the glasses. They can last up to 1 minute and you can send them to WhatsApp and Messenger, the two main messaging platforms owned by Meta. You can also have your glasses play any voice messages you’ve received by saying “Hey, Meta, play message” after receiving an announcement that a message was received.

The second big addition is that you can now set timers hands-free from your glasses. And when a timer is up, you are notified by the glasses, which makes sense.

And third among the updates in version 9.0 is the ability to share Meta AI responses to Facebook or Instagram stories, or with any of your contacts. You will also use your voice to do this and you will need to connect these apps to the Meta View app. (It’s nice that Meta isn’t going overboard by doing this automatically, actually.) When you interact with Meta AI — which is a bit like a chatbot — you can simply say, “Hey, Meta, share this,” to share outside of the Meta View app.

None of this is as exciting as what Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg showed at Meta Connect in late September – so we still have plenty of other major updates coming at some point.