Five Hacks Every Meta Smart Glasses User Should Know

I’ve been wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses almost every day for over a year. They’re great for snapping hands-free photos, catching up on notifications, and listening to podcasts on bike rides, but they aren’t the most customizable tech product out there. Still, they’re not totally hack-proof. Below are five ways to mod your Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta smart glasses, use them in ways that are not “officially sanctioned,” and generally make your smart glasses a little smarter than everyone else’s.

I’m an upstanding citizen, so I categorize my receipts for tax purposes dutifully. But I don’t like doing it at all, so I figured out how to use my Meta glasses as an almost-totally-automated receipt scanner and organizer. This process saves photos of your receipts in a folder, uses AI to scan them and categorize everything in them, then saves the info in a searchable spreadsheet. And it does it all without you needing to touch a phone or keyboard.

What you’ll need to set up your Meta glasses as a receipt scanner

• About 15 minutes of free time, depending on how tech-savvy you are.

• Meta glasses, either Oakley or Ray-Ban

• A dedicated Gmail account for tax information.

• Google Drive, Google Sheets, Google Photos, and Google Apps Script (all free)

• A Claude AI API key (a few cents per receipt)

How scanning receipts with your Meta glasses works

Once set up, you’ll be able to look at a receipt and say, “Hey, Meta, take a photo.” Then say, “Hey, Siri, email that photo to (insert your Gmail address here) with the subject ‘receipt.'” Every night, a script automatically reads the receipt, extracts the vendor, date, and amount, logs everything in a spreadsheet, and saves the photo of the receipt in an album. You won’t even have to open that mail account until April (but I’d check it occasionally to make sure it’s actually working).

Setting up your Meta glasses to scan receipts

• Step 1: Create a dedicated Gmail account for your taxes. This keeps everything clean and separate from your daily inbox.

• Step 2: In that tax Gmail account, create a label called “Receipts” and set up a filter so any email with “receipt” in the subject line automatically gets that label. Go to Settings > Filters and Blocked Addresses > Create new filter.

• Step 3: Create a “Taxes” folder in Google Drive. This is where your receipt spreadsheet will live.

• Step 4: Create a Google Sheet called “Receipt Log” with these column headers: Date, Vendor, Amount, Tax Category, Notes, Drive Link.

• Step 5: Open your Receipt Log, then click Extensions > Apps Script. I wrote a script with the help of Claude AI for this part, which you can find in the Google Doc here. This tells the AI to look at the receipt and figure out how to put it in the right categories; copy and paste it into Apps Script.

• Step 6: Get a Claude API key at console.anthropic.com. You might be able to use an AI other than Claude for this project, but I don’t know for sure because I haven’t tested any others. The cost is a few cents per receipt, so dropping in $5 should cover the year.

• Step 7: In Sheets, go to Project Settings > Script Properties > Add. Add a property called CLAUDE_API_KEY and paste your key as the value. (Never paste it directly in the code.)

• Step 8: Set up a daily trigger so the script runs automatically. In Apps Script, click the clock icon, choose Add Trigger, then set it to run “processReceipts” on a daily timer.

Things to keep in mind when using your Meta glasses to scan receipts

• Save the paper receipts: You should get an error message if there’s an issue reading a specific receipt, but since these are tax documents, keep copies of all of them, just in case.

• Make photos as clear as possible: AI can only read what your glasses see, so hold the receipt flat, make sure the lighting is decent, and get close enough that the text fills the frame. Meta’s camera is in one arm, but it’s “aimed” for the middle, so keep the receipt centered as much as possible. Crumpled or backlit receipts will give you less accurate results and may need a quick manual correction.

• You could use your phone to take pictures of receipts, too. It’s not as elegant, and you have to use your hands, but it’s easier to see that you’ve taken a clear photo.

Since the camera, speakers, and CPU of Meta glasses live entirely in the frames, you can switch the lenses out easily without fear of damaging your spy-glasses. The lenses of Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta glasses pop right out and click back in without any tools, so you can swap between clear, tinted, polarized, sport, or reading lenses in seconds, depending on what you’re doing.

To replace the lenses, place your thumbs near the bottom of the lens and push firmly and evenly to pop it out. To put a new one in, align it near the temple arm and gently push around the edges until it clicks into place with no gaps. Companies like Revant Optics and VR Wave make all kinds of lenses cut specifically for all models of Meta frames, both Ray-Ban and Oakley. Options include tinted, mirrored, polarized, and transition lenses, with prices starting around $40.

Meta hid a useful feature for its Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta glasses in the accessibility menu. Enhanced visual descriptions give you a more detailed description of what you’re seeing, adding details like colors, textures, and how many people are in a room, among other things. The feature was designed for low-vision users, but it’s genuinely useful for anyone. To enable it: open the Meta AI app, tap the Glasses icon, then hit the settings gear. From here, head to Accessibility, then scroll to find Detailed Responses. Once enabled, try saying “Hey Meta, describe what I’m seeing.”

Here are a couple of other ways to make your AI voice better: In Settings, you can change the speed at which your AI voice talks to you. Setting it up to at least 1.25 is a must. In addition, you’d probably think switching to a “celebrity voice” would be annoying, but they generally sound more natural than Meta’s stock voices (at least to me). It also doesn’t change the things Meta says into what, for example, Awkwafina might say: It’s just Awkwafina’s voice saying the same thing Meta’s voice would.

I have my best ideas when doing dishes, riding a bike, and juggling—pretty much the worst times to take down a note. So I use this simple but powerful method to turn my glasses into a hands-free brain-dump organizer. Here’s how to do it: Create a WhatsApp or Messenger group with you as the only member. Then, whenever a thought hits you when you’re cooking, driving, or riding your bike, you can say, “Hey Meta, message (YOU) on WhatsApp: (YOUR BRILLIANT IDEA).” The result is a hands-free, time-stamped, searchable, automatically transcribed log of all your ideas.

My Meta smart glasses get around eight hours of battery on a single charge, depending on how I use them, which sounds fine until I’m working overtime. Because there’s no charging port on the glasses, you might think you’d be stuck with dumb glasses when the power runs out, but you can actually keep Metas going without using the charging case. There are a couple of options for on-your-face charging:

• Battery packs like the PrismXR Carina C1 snap onto the frame magnetically and connect via the same external charging contacts the cases use. Each adds about two hours of use.

• If you don’t mind a cord running into your pocket, you can add a clip-on cable that links to the glasses’ charging interface and runs to a power brick in your pocket. This extends the Meta glasses’ life to as long as your battery of choice lasts.

Dishonorable mention: blacking out the camera light

It’s no secret that you can block the indicator light on your Meta glasses and still use the camera, but you shouldn’t do this. There might be a few legitimate reasons for it—maybe you’re taking wildlife photos and you don’t want to spook the animals, or you’re using the glasses to take selfie videos in a mirror—but generally, the light is there to make it more obvious to others that you’re taking a photo or video, so blacking it out is creepy.