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Meta expected to announce celebrity voices for AI chatbot including Judi Dench, John Cena, Kristin Bell at Connect this week
Facebook parent Meta is reportedly planning to unveil celebrity voices from the likes of Judi Dench and John Cena for its chatbot assistant, called Meta AI, at an event this week.
Meta announced the ChatGPT-like tool at its annual Connect conference last year with a feature that allowed users to chat with bots that used a celebrity’s image and imitated elements of their personalities.
But the now-discontinued feature only provided text-based chats.
The new audio feature includes voices from Awkwafina, Kristen Bell and Keegan-Michael Key, as well as Dench, Cena and several non-celebrity options, Reuters reported.
Reports in early August said Meta was in talks with celebrities and influencers over the right to incorporate their voices into Meta AI.
Annual conference
The celebrity voices will first be released in the US and other English-speaking markets this week for users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other Meta apps.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg released a promotional video on Instagram last week showing himself, Cena and others engaging in stunts while wearing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
At this year’s Connect conference on Wednesday the company is also expected to announce an initial release of augmented reality glasses and to discuss the roadmap for other hardware such as the Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
Last year the Ray-Ban Meta glasses became the company’s first hardware product to include an audio version of the AI chatbot.
In July Meta shut down access to the celebrity personality versions of its chatbot and shifted the focus to AI Studio, a tool that allows creators to make AI chatbots of themselves.
Celebrity voices
Most Meta AI chatbot daily users access the app through WhatsApp, followed by Facebook, with few Instagram users engaging with it, said a report from The Information this month, citing internal data.
Most people use the app for research and to retrieve information, the report said.
Meta is competing with ChatGPT from Microsoft-backed OpenAI as well as other AI tools including Grok from Elon Musk start-up xAI.
In May OpenAI launched an AI model called GPT-4o with voice capabilities, but pulled one of the voices, called Sky, after Scarlett Johansson said the voice was “eerily similar” to hers, even though she had declined to work with the company on such a feature.
Reports this month said ChatGPT is about to conclude a funding round worth more than $6 billion (£4.5bn) that values the start-up at more than $150bn, stepping up its competition with the likes of Meta and Google over generative AI.
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