Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 lands in India at a higher price. Muse, the AI it is built around, still is not on it.

A third India launch, a third price increase

Meta brought Ray-Ban Meta glasses to India for the third time in 17 months on 1 October 2026, and the price has gone up every single time. The original pair launched in India on 12 May 2025 at 29,900 rupees. Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 followed on 1 December 2025 at 39,900 rupees. Now Gen 3 starts at 44,300 rupees, with a Transitions-lens version at 50,100 rupees and a polarized option at 46,500 rupees. Overseas, Meta prices the new generation at 449 dollars, according to reporting from MIXED Reality News.

Alongside the glasses themselves, Meta announced Ray-Ban Meta Audio, a camera-free model aimed at people who want the AI assistant and the earbuds without a lens on their face, and named Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh as the first Indian brand ambassador for Ray-Ban and Ray-Ban Meta. The company also used the post to restate a promise it made weeks earlier: Muse, the personal AI agent at the center of Meta's glasses pitch, is still not running on any pair of glasses you can actually buy.

What's new in Gen 3

The headline changes are incremental, not dramatic. Battery life rises to up to nine hours on a charge, an hour more than Gen 2's eight. The camera stays at 12 megapixels but now records 3K Ultra HD video and adds a "dynamic photos" mode. A six-microphone array replaces the previous five-mic setup, and Meta says it cuts more than 90 percent of background noise, a change aimed at voice commands working in windy streets or crowded rooms rather than at photo or video quality.

The frame itself got the bigger overhaul. Gen 3 is slimmer, with professionally adjustable temple tips, and Meta is widening the style range: Wayfarer, the familiar shape from Gen 1 and Gen 2, is now joined by Aviator and a new cat-eye style called Zena. Across those three shapes, Meta offers 27 color and lens combinations globally, including a limited-edition vintage-style Aviator marking Ray-Ban's 90th anniversary. The glasses ship through meta.com, in.rayban.com, and consumer electronics and optical retailers across India.

Ray-Ban Meta Audio: lighter, no camera

Ray-Ban Meta Audio drops the camera entirely and focuses on sound. It weighs 43 grams, which Meta and independent reporting from WeRSM both describe as the lightest AI glasses the company has made, and it runs up to 12 hours on a single charge with another 48 hours available from its charging case. The frame carries adjustable, swappable nose pads and reinforced hinges meant to survive being pulled on and off throughout the day. Functionally it plays music and podcasts, handles phone calls hands-free, and reaches Meta's AI assistant by voice, all without the privacy questions a camera-equipped pair invites.

Meta's own announcement describes the Audio line as "coming soon" rather than available at launch, so Gen 3 is the model you can actually order in India today. Audio has no confirmed India release date or price yet.

Ranveer Singh and the marketing push

The ambassador deal is new ground for Ray-Ban in India specifically. "Ray-Ban has always stood for individuality, and that is something I have connected with for as long as I can remember. Style, for me, has never been about following a fixed formula, it is about instinct, mood and having the freedom to express every version of yourself," Singh said in Meta's announcement. The partnership launches under a campaign called "Frame Your True Self," and Singh has worked with Meta on earlier campaigns, so the tie-up builds on an existing relationship rather than starting cold.

Marketing muscle is doing real work here. A smart glasses market that is still mostly a novelty for most shoppers needs a recognizable face to get people into a Ray-Ban store rather than a generic electronics aisle, and a Bollywood star carries exactly that kind of reach in India. It does not, by itself, make the hardware more capable.

Muse still is not on any pair of glasses

The gap in this launch is the software Meta keeps pointing to as the reason the glasses matter. Meta introduced Muse, its personal AI agent, at Connect 2026 on 23 September, giving it a customizable wake name and promising it would soon get its own email address. In the India announcement, Meta repeats that promise for the glasses specifically: "In the coming months we're bringing Muse to our AI glasses for hands-free access, activated by saying your agent's name." Coming months is not a date, and it is the same open-ended language Meta used when it unveiled a keychain-sized Muse device called Muse Charm at the same event, which also shipped with no price, no finished hardware, and a vague holiday timeline.

TechCrunch's reporting on the September announcement noted that several of Muse's marquee features, the email address among them, were described as available "soon" without a firmer date, and that the glasses integration was pegged only to "the coming months." Buy a Gen 3 today and you get Meta AI, the assistant that has run on Ray-Ban Meta glasses since the first generation, not Muse. The company has now announced Muse twice, for two different devices, and shipped it on neither.

Our take

The hardware upgrades in Gen 3 are real and checkable: a longer battery, a better microphone array, a sharper camera, and more frame choices, all independently confirmed by reporting beyond Meta's own post. What is not real yet is the thing Meta keeps using to sell the idea of AI glasses in the first place. Buy Gen 3 for the camera, the battery, and Meta AI as it exists today, not for Muse, which Meta has now promised twice and delivered nowhere. And budget for the fact that every India launch so far has cost more than the one before it.