TL;DR: you now need to pay a $20/month “meta premium” subscription to use a 100% offline feature that runs on your own malware-ridden smartglasses.
If you don’t subscribe, you can use the feature that is already included in the hardware that you already paid for 3 hours each month
The now-paywalled feature boosts the voice of the speaker in front of you, something that even low-end ANC earphones are doing now. 5 minutes of free usage per day is basically nothing.
Pretty sure the author nailed it, but I hit a paywall before I could copy it.
Anyways:
The only plausible explanation is they licensed this feature, expected huge sales to cover the license, and now can’t.
I don’t think they have licensed it per use, it was likely a flat fee and now they’re desperate to recoup it. They can’t do it by sales, so it’s monthly fees.
It might not even be this directly, but some other license and this is just where they can squeeze consumers. They might have even just picked what gets used the most
These things are very clearly just used for data collection for AI training. Making the users offset the cost is just bonus.