The Meta AI app explained: the companion app for Meta's smart glasses

The Meta AI app is the phone app you use to set up and manage Meta's AI glasses: Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, Meta Glasses and Meta Ray-Ban Display. Meta's own App Store listing calls it "the required companion app for managing your AI glasses from Meta, importing and sharing media, and more." It is also Meta's standalone app for its AI assistant, so it does two jobs at once.

If you're looking for Meta View, this is it. Meta replaced it with the Meta AI app on April 29, 2025. This guide is based on Meta's help center, its announcements and the app's store listings.

What happened to Meta View

Meta merged its new Meta AI app with the Meta View companion app, so owners didn't need a new download: updating Meta View turned it into the Meta AI app. Meta says paired devices, settings and media moved over automatically to a Devices tab.

Two practical changes came with the switch, according to Meta's help center. Imported photos now land in a folder called Meta AI in your phone's photo gallery, so if you back up your photos to a service like Google Photos, you need to add that folder to your backup settings. And the app asks you to create a Meta AI username, which is how you appear if you post to the app's public Discover feed.

A few things didn't change. Ray-Ban Stories, Meta's first glasses from 2021, are still supported, although Meta AI itself doesn't run on them. You still can't pair or manage glasses on the meta.ai website. And the iPad version kept supporting Ray-Ban Meta and Ray-Ban Stories, but Meta says the assistant isn't available in the iPad app and future Meta devices won't be supported there.

What the app does for your glasses

Most glasses settings sit behind the Glasses button in the top right corner of the app, then Device settings. If you have more than one pair, you swipe left or right to choose which one you're adjusting. Meta says the app can hold up to seven devices.

The Experiences list is worth a look after every update. Meta's feature availability page says it shows the Meta AI capabilities, app integrations, camera features and translation and accessibility features available on your specific glasses, which vary by country. Your glasses need to be on Wi-Fi and paired with your phone to check availability and download feature updates.

The app is also where you connect other services. Meta's help pages describe linking a fitness app so you can ask about past workouts, a Google or Outlook calendar, music services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Audible, Garmin devices for workouts, and Be My Eyes for help from sighted volunteers. Golf apps from 18Birdies and Arccos appear for adults in the US and Canada in English.

Finally, the app runs Meta's Early Access program, which gets you features before everyone else. Conversation focus, for example, launched there, and in June the program added Wi-Fi Aware, which removes the "Meta AI wants to join Wi-Fi network" prompt iPhone owners see when they import media.

Your gallery: importing photos and videos

Photos and videos you take for your gallery are stored privately on the glasses, and you decide when to import them to your phone, Meta says. Once imported, they sit in your phone's gallery like any other photo, and they're yours to share or keep.

The Devices tab is where you import and share your photos and videos, and since April the app has AI editing tools that animate photos, apply AI edits or restyle them, according to Meta's release notes. You can also ask Meta AI in the app about a photo you imported from the glasses, or ask it to add, remove or change parts of the image.

Photos you take as part of a question to Meta AI are a different case. When you ask Meta AI about what you see, the glasses send a photo to Meta's cloud, and you can review the request, the image and the answer in the app's Chats section.

Meta AI inside the app

Open the app without touching the glasses and you get Meta's AI assistant, now powered by Muse Spark. Since an April redesign, it has Instant and Thinking modes, and it brought live AI, already available on the glasses, to the phone: point your camera at something and ask about it in real time, Meta said. The app's listing adds voice conversations in 13 languages, research reports, image creation and editing, and shopping help.

Your glasses and the app share a history. Questions you ask on the glasses show up in the app's history, and you can pick up a conversation from the glasses in the app or on meta.ai, though not the other way around. Conversations stay private unless you share them to the Discover feed. In May, Meta announced Incognito Chat for the Meta AI app and WhatsApp. Meta says those conversations are processed in a secure environment that even it can't access, aren't saved, and disappear by default. It's rolling out over several months.

A few glasses features also use the app's screen. Live translation shows a transcript on your phone that the other person can read or play aloud. The nutrition tracking Meta announced in March keeps your food log in the app. And on Meta Ray-Ban Display, you create your Hologram, a photorealistic likeness for video calls, with a short self-capture in the app.

Privacy settings in the Meta AI app

The settings that control what Meta keeps are spread across a few places:

• Voice activity log. Voice interactions on the glasses are stored here, and Meta says it can process them with machine learning and trained reviewers to improve its products. With the switch to the Meta AI app, Meta removed the option to stop storing voice recordings, but you can delete them, and you can download them with Meta's Download your information tool.
• Camera use by voice. Meta AI's access to the camera is tied to "Hey Meta." Turning off "Hey Meta" also stops Meta AI from taking photos by voice to answer questions.
• Additional data. During setup, and later in Glasses privacy, you choose whether Meta can use extra usage data from your glasses to improve its products. The choice covers every device paired with the app and doesn't include your photos and videos.
• Memory. In the US and Canada, Meta AI can remember details from your conversations. You can ask it what it remembers, tell it to forget something, or delete a chat message in the app to remove what it learned from that message.
• Location. Weather and other location-based answers need location access set to "always allow" for the Meta AI app.

What's coming

Meta told developers at Connect that the app will soon get a list of curated experiences for connected AI glasses, according to its developer recap. Until now, apps from outside developers could only be tested in developer mode, so this would be the first time they reach owners directly. Muse, Meta's new personal agent, lives in its own app for now; Meta says it will reach the glasses in the coming months. For a full rundown of what the assistant does on each pair of glasses, see our guide to Meta AI on smart glasses.