Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Meta, his social media conglomerate turned metaverse turned AI, will upgrade its AI assistants to give them a range of celebrity voices, including Dame Judi Dench and John Cena. A more vital update for Meta’s long-term ambitions, however, is the recent ability for its models to look at users’ photos and other visual information.
Meta also announced Llama 3.2 today, the first version of its free AI models that have visual capabilities, expanding their usefulness and relevance to robotics, virtual reality, and so-called AI agents. Some versions of Llama 3.2 are also the first to be optimized to run on mobile devices. This could aid developers create AI-powered apps that run on a smartphone and utilize its camera or monitor its screen to interact with the app on your behalf.
“This is our first open-source multimodal model, and it will enable a lot of interesting use cases that require visual understanding,” Zuckerberg said on stage at Connect, Meta’s event, held today in California.
Given the enormous reach of Meta FacebookInstagram, WhatsApp and Messengerthe assistant upgrade could give many people their first taste of a recent generation of more vocal and visually capable AI assistants. Meta said today that more than 180 million people are already using Meta AI, as the company’s AI assistant is called, each week.
Zuckerberg showed off a range of recent AI features at Connect. He showed videos of a pair of Ray Ban intelligent glasses powered by Llama 3.2 giving recipe advice based on observable ingredients and commenting on clothes on a rack in a store. The Meta CEO also showed off some experimental AI features the company is working on. They include software that can live translate from Spanish to English, automatically dub videos into different languages, and an avatar for creators that can answer questions from fans on their behalf.
Meta has recently given its AI a more prominent place in its apps — for example, by making it part of the search bar in Instagram and Messenger. The recent celebrity voice options available to users will also include Awkwafina, Keegan Michael Key, and Kristen Bell.
Meta has previously given celebrity personas to its text assistants, but those personas haven’t gained much traction. In July, the company launched a tool called AI Studio that lets users create chatbots with any persona they choose. Meta says the recent voices will be rolling out to users in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Modern Zealand over the next month. Meta AI’s imaging capabilities will roll out in the U.S., but the company didn’t say when the features might come to other markets.
The recent version of Meta AI will also be able to provide feedback and information about users’ photos; for example, if you’re not sure what kind of bird you’ve photographed, it can tell you what species it is. It will also be able to aid edit photos, such as adding recent backgrounds or details on demand. Google released a similar tool for its Pixel and Google Photos smartphones in April.