Meta will unveil celebrity voices for AI chatbots this week at Connect, including Judi Dench, John Cena and Kristen Bell
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is reportedly planning to feature the voices of celebrities such as Judi Dench and John Cena on a chatbot assistant called Meta AI at an event this week.
Meta unveiled a ChatGPT-like tool at its annual Connect conference last year that uses images of celebrities and lets users chat with bots that mimic elements of their personalities.
However, the now-defunct feature only offered text-based chat.
According to Reuters, the new voice features include Awkwafina, Kristen Bell and Keegan-Michael Key, as well as Dench, Cena and other non-celebrity voices.
Reports in early August said Meta was in talks with celebrities and influencers for the rights to incorporate their voices into Meta AI.
Image credit: Meta
Annual Conference
The celebrity testimonials will be first released to users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other Meta apps in the US and other English-speaking markets this week.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week released a promotional video on Instagram showing himself, Cena and others performing stunts while wearing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
The company is set to announce the release of its first set of augmented reality glasses at this year’s Connect conference on Wednesday, where it will also discuss its roadmap for other hardware, including Ray-Ban Metaglasses.
Last year, Ray-Ban’s Meta glasses became the company’s first hardware product to feature a voice version of an AI chatbot.
In July, Meta shut down access to its celebrity personality versions of its chatbots, shifting its focus to AI Studio, a tool that lets creators build their own AI chatbots.
Celebrity testimonials
A report from The Information this month said that based on internal data, most of the Meta AI chatbot’s daily users access the app via WhatsApp, followed by Facebook, with very little engagement from Instagram users.
According to the report, most people use the app for research and information searches.
Meta competes with other AI tools such as ChatGPT from Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Grok from Elon Musk’s startup xAI.
In May, OpenAI launched an AI model called GPT-4o with voice capabilities, but removed one of the voices, called Sky, after Scarlett Johansson said the voice was “eerily similar” to her own. Johansson had declined to work with the company on such features.
Reports this month said ChatGPT is set to close a funding round of more than $6bn (£4.5bn), which would value the company at more than $150bn and intensify its competition for generative AI with the likes of Meta and Google.
