Thursday, 18 September, 2025 UTC
Summary
Meta is readying a Conversation Focus feature for its smart glasses which will amplify the voice of the person you're speaking to.
The feature follows years-in-development research toward what Facebook at the time called enhanced hearing, as part of its "perceptual superpowers" project, back in 2020.
Facebook Researching VR/AR ‘Hear-Through’ Technology For ‘Perceptual Superpowers’
Facebook researchers are investigating AR glasses featuring “hear-through” technology powered by specialized in-ear monitors for “enhanced hearing.” The technology “would be able to recognize different types of events happening around you: people having conversations, the air conditioning noise, dishes and silverware clanking. Then using contextualized AI, your AR glasses would
UploadVRIan Hamilton
A clip Meta showed during Connect today featured a person pausing during a face-to-face conversation on the street to invoke Meta AI with the command "start conversation focus".
"Amplify your friend's voices in your ear," Mark Zuckerberg promised. "If you're in a noisy restaurant, you're basically going to be able to turn up the volume on your friends or whoever you're talking to."
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Conversation Focus
We'll be extremely curious to test this feature out when it launches. In the clip, the amplified voice seems distorted in a distracting way, and I can't imagine interrupting a conversation to invoke the AI like that. Still, it could be a useful accessibility feature for people hard of hearing.
Meta says Conversation Focus will be available on all of its supported smart glasses, including Ray-Ban Meta, Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2, Oakley Meta HSTN, Oakley Meta Vanguard, and Meta Ray-Ban Display.