Meta Expands AI Access on Ray-Ban Smart Glasses in Europe

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a pair of Ray-Ban smart glasses appear on screen, during the Meta Connect event at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, US, September 27, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a pair of Ray-Ban smart glasses appear on screen, during the Meta Connect event at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, US, September 27, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
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Meta Expands AI Access on Ray-Ban Smart Glasses in Europe

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a pair of Ray-Ban smart glasses appear on screen, during the Meta Connect event at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, US, September 27, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a pair of Ray-Ban smart glasses appear on screen, during the Meta Connect event at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, US, September 27, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo

Meta Platforms said on Wednesday it is expanding access to its artificial intelligence assistant, Meta AI, on Ray-Ban smart glasses to seven additional European countries.

People in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland will now be able to interact with Meta AI using voice prompts to get answers to general questions, the Facebook and Instagram parent said.

Meta launched its AI technology in Europe in March, a rollout that was initially announced in June last year but was delayed following regulatory concerns on data protection and privacy.

While Meta AI was launched in the US in 2023, its release in Europe faced several hurdles due to the European Union's stringent privacy and transparency rules, Reuters reported.

Sprucing up its wearable technology with AI capabilities could help Meta attract new users at a time when the company is investing billions of dollars in bolstering its AI infrastructure.

Meta said the expansion will also include a live translation feature, which is being broadly rolled out in its markets.

It will be releasing a feature, where people can ask Meta AI about the things they are looking at and get real-time responses, in supported countries in the EU starting next week.

The company updated Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with AI video capability and real-time language translation functionality in December 2024.

Meta had first announced the features during its annual Connect conference in September last year.



Huawei Launches 1st Laptops Using Home-grown Harmony Operating System

Huawei Atlas 800 inference server is displayed at InnoEX Fair, in Hong Kong, China April 15, 2025. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
Huawei Atlas 800 inference server is displayed at InnoEX Fair, in Hong Kong, China April 15, 2025. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
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Huawei Launches 1st Laptops Using Home-grown Harmony Operating System

Huawei Atlas 800 inference server is displayed at InnoEX Fair, in Hong Kong, China April 15, 2025. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
Huawei Atlas 800 inference server is displayed at InnoEX Fair, in Hong Kong, China April 15, 2025. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo

Huawei launched two new laptop models on Monday, the first sold with its own Harmony operating system, in a bid to take on well-established Western Big Tech rivals even as the United States seeks to limit its access to crucial chips.

Despite its emergence as the world's leading producer of tech hardware, China's development of computer operating systems has lagged behind Microsoft (MSFT.O), and Apple (AAPL.O), whose Windows and macOS have cornered the global market for decades.

The new MateBook Fold and MateBook Pro both run on HarmonyOS 5, the latest version of an operating system Huawei Technologies began developing in 2015 and introduced five years later on its Mate series smartphones, Reuters reported.

It began developing the laptop prototypes in 2021.

"The Harmony laptop gives the world a new choice," Yu Chengdong, head of Huawei's consumer business group, said during a livestreamed launch event. "We kept on doing the hard things but the right things."

The base model of the MateBook Fold, which does not have a physical keyboard and offers an 18-inch OLED double screen when fully extended, will sell for 23,999 yuan ($3,328).

The MateBook Pro model, which uses a conventional laptop keyboard, is priced from 7,999 yuan.

Washington began restricting Huawei's access to U.S. technology in 2019 over national security concerns, pushing the company to build its own capacity to develop and produce chips and operating systems.

Huawei said the HarmonyOS for computers currently offers over 150 applications, including WPS Office from Kingsoft (3888.HK), - an alternative to Microsoft's Office - and photo editing app Meitu (1357.HK), Xiu Xiu.

By the end of 2024, over 7.2 million individual developers were developing apps for HarmonyOS, which was installed on over a billion devices, including smartphones and TVs, according to Huawei's latest annual report.

Huawei did not disclose which processing chip it had used to power the newly-launched laptops. But it said the computers' relatively high prices were the result of the cost of new manufacturing technology for the chipset.