Meta is adding conversational voices by celebrities to its AI chatbot in Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook.
The company announced at its Connect event today that you can now talk to Meta AI and hear it respond in one of several voices, including celebrity soundalikes such as Awkwafina, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristen Bell, and the only one I truly care about: Dame Judi Dench.
These celebrity voices will only be available to US users of Meta’s apps to start. And if you prefer a voice that is a little more mundane, you can also pick from non-celeb voices with names like “Aspen,” “Atlas,” or “Clover.” Google and OpenAI also now offer similar conversational experiences that ostensibly aren’t based on celebrity voices.
Meta hasn’t shared those details, but the company has paid each celebrity “millions of dollars” for their voices, according to The Wall Street Journal. And in negotiations, some of the people reportedly wanted to limit what their voices could say and to make sure they weren’t liable if Meta AI was used.
Meta’s AI updates aren’t just about voice conversations. Its chatbot will also now “answer questions about your photos” when you upload images. Send a picture of a cake, ask how to make it, and it’ll grab you a recipe that hopefully does just that.
And if you want something “added, changed, or removed” from an image, Meta says you can describe anything from “changing your outfit to replacing the background with a rainbow,” and it’ll carry out that request.
In the above examples from our hands-on testing, Meta AI changed the color of a T-shirt. It’s not clear what, if any, guardrails there are on this experience. With Google AI, we have plenty of examples of what this sort of tech can do, for better or worse, and we’ll see sometime in the next year how Apple manages it, too.
