Meta’s latest smart glasses feature would have been perfect at the Winter Olympics — but I’m frustrated it can’t be used by everyone

• Meta's smart glasses are getting update v23
• It will bring new snow sports stats to users with a Garmin watch
• Other upgrades improve conversational and translation abilities

Meta’s smart glasses are getting their v23 update right now, and the standout upgrade would have been perfect at the Winter Olympics — it's too bad that it's landed just a little too late. Nifty translation and conversational improvements are on the way too.

The standout upgrade is new snow sports integration. As a Meta article explains, with the aid of a Garmin device your glasses will be able to tell you about your current skiing or snowboarding excursion — such as how far you’ve travelled, your last run’s max speed, the steepness of the slope, and your personal records.

As with the running integration you can also create shareable auto-captures which overlay interesting data from key moments onto clips your smart specs capture automatically.

As with Meta’s glasses’ other fitness features, you’ll need to pair your specs with a compatible Garmin watch — so if you rely on a different brand of smart band or don’t own one at all you’re out of luck. You’ll also want to have your phone in your pocket with the Meta AI app installed, and make sure it’s paired with both your watch and specs.

With all that ready to go, when you next hit the slopes you’ll just need to start a snow sport activity on your Garmin device, and it’ll start capturing all the data you need and creating a neat auto-capture — just note that colder weather will drain your glasses’ battery more quickly than you might normally expect.

New translation tools are headed to the glasses too — if you’re in the early access program that is. These are Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Swedish, and Finnish, with Meta promising more to come.

Meta’s translation is arguably its glasses least impressive AI feature compared to rivals — not because of inaccuracies but because the language selection is much less broad compared to other specs.

This update should help to alleviate those ongoing woes somewhat; I just wish it was coming to everybody and not just a select few.

Lastly there’s the promise of a more conversational Meta AI. Once you engage with 'Hey Meta' you won’t need to keep saying the wake word to keep the conversation flowing — but at the moment this is only if you live in the US or Canada.

Overall this update is more minor — especially as the biggest upgrade requires you to own a Garmin device on top of your smart glasses — but hopefully Meta’s renewed AR / AI focus will mean we see bigger improvements down the line.

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