Five Hacks for Meta Smart Glasses You Should Try

Credit: René Ramos/Lifehacker/Adobe Stock/Meta

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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.

Use Your Meta Glasses as a Receipt Scanner

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 this Google Doc. 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 to be re-scanned manually.