Meta adds celebrity conversational voices to its AI chatbots on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook.
The company announced at its Connect event today that you can now talk to Meta AI and hear a response in one of several voices, including celebrity look-alikes such as Awkwafina, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristen Bell, and the only person I truly care about: Dame Judi Dench.
These celebrity voices will initially only be available to U.S. users of Meta’s app. If you prefer something a little more mundane, you can also choose from non-celebrity voices with names like “Aspen,” “Atlas,” and “Clover.” Google and OpenAI also currently offer similar conversational experiences that are not ostensibly based on celebrity voices.
Meta hasn’t released details, but The Wall Street Journal said the company is paying each celebrity “millions of dollars” for their voices, and that in negotiations some of them reportedly wanted to limit what the voices could say to avoid liability if Meta AI was used.
Meta’s AI updates go beyond voice conversations: its chatbot can now “answer photo questions” after you upload an image. Send a photo of a cake, ask how to make it, and it’ll find the recipe for you, just like that.
It also says that if you want to “add, change or remove” something from an image, you can describe anything from “changing the outfit” to “replacing the background with a rainbow” and Meta will carry out your request.
In the hands-on test example above, Meta AI changed the color of the t-shirt. It’s unclear what guardrails this experience has, or if there are any. Google AI has plenty of examples of what this kind of technology can do, for better or worse, and we’ll likely see how Apple manages this next year.
