new York
CNN
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Facebook and Instagram users can now Voices that are very reminiscent of John Cena and Judi Dench. However, these are not real actors, but a chatbot with artificial intelligence.

Parent company Meta (META) announced Wednesday that it will add voice conversations and celebrity voices to its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, Meta AI. Instead of simply communicating with the chatbot, users can now have real-time conversations and choose from a selection of computer-generated or celebrity voices.

The company worked with Cena and Dench, as well as actors Kristen Bell, Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key, to train the chatbot to imitate their voices.

The update comes as Meta tries to help its AI chatbot – which lets users chat on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads – keep up with rival products, including ChatGPT, which is introducing its own enhanced voice mode. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta AI is on track to be “the most widely used AI assistant in the world” by the end of this year, likely thanks to the more than 3 billion people who the company’s apps daily, although it’s not clear how Meta measures the chatbot’s usage and how frequently people use the tool.

rival OpenAI came under fire earlier this year when it demonstrated its own real-time voice feature for ChatGPT because a demo voice sounded remarkably like actress Scarlett Johansson. Johansson said she was asked to participate in the project but declined. OpenAI denied that the voice that was dubbed Sky was based on Johansson but suspended its use anyway. In contrast to that debacle, Meta appears to have entered into formal partnerships with the actors whose voices were used to train the tool.

Zuckerberg announced the new voice mode during his keynote speech at the company’s annual Meta Connect conference, where he also unveiled other AI advancements, a new, cheaper version of Meta’s Quest headsets and updates to the company’s augmented reality line of RayBan glasses.

Other notable announcements include: Meta now lets social media influencers create AI versions of themselves. Previously, influencers could train AI to have text conversations with their followers. Now, followers can have full quasi-video calls with the AI ​​versions of the influencers using the tool.

Meta’s AI technology also automatically translates and syncs foreign language Reels (Meta’s short videos) for viewers. So if you speak English but a Reel appears in your feed that was originally created in Spanish, for example, it will appear in your feed as if it were produced in English, including editing of the speaker’s mouth to make the dubbing appear natural.

And you may see more AI-generated content in your Facebook and Instagram feeds. Meta says it will start generating and sharing AI-generated images in users’ feeds based on their “interests or current trends,” a feature it calls “designed for you.” (It’s not clear if users can opt out of this if they’d rather only see content from their real, human friends.)

Meta’s AR glasses also feature live translation powered by AI. A user can have a conversation with someone speaking a foreign language and hear the translation into their own language in their ear within seconds, Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg also unveiled “Orion,” a prototype of a more sophisticated pair of glasses that would essentially pack the power of an AR headset — like Meta Quest or Apple’s Vision Pro — into a largely normal-looking (if somewhat clunky) pair of glasses.

But there’s a big difference between Orion and headsets like Quest or Vision Pro. Existing AR headsets have users looking at a screen that uses a camera to display emails or photos superimposed onto the user’s surroundings – a technology known as “passthrough.” But Orion’s lenses are actually see-through, using holograms that make it look like your email inbox or text messages, or even a live 3D representation of a friend, are floating in space next to you.

Zuckerberg called them “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen,” but they are not yet available to consumers. The executive said Meta will continue to experiment with the glasses internally and make them available to select third-party developers to build software for them before eventually releasing a consumer version.