Meta is revamping its chatbot with an array of celebrity voices — part of a bet that the star power of Dame Judi Dench and John Cena will draw users to the companies’ artificial intelligence tools for entertainment along with information.
Its chatbot, Meta AI, will respond to queries in a menu of famous voices, including Awkwafina, Keegan Michael Key and Kristen Bell, the social media giant announced Wednesday at its annual developers conference.
“Let Meta AI explain something you’re curious about or listen to a joke to lighten the mood,” the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday.
The move comes just months after OpenAI stalled plans equip ChatGPT with a voice. Most tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, have backed a single flagship chatbot with a largely fixed identity.
But Meta is pursuing a different strategy, offering users a plethora of options to personalize their chatbots to their own specific interests and tastes. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described its tools as a variety of AI chatbots each catered to a specific situation — a customer service rep for small businesses or a fun travel guide for globe-trotting 20-somethings.
“Some of the use cases are utilitarian, like searching for information or role-playing difficult conversations before you have them with another person, and other uses are more creative,” Zuckerberg told investors in July during an earnings call.
“Part of the beauty of AI is that it’s general, so we’re still uncovering the wide range of use cases that it’s valuable for.”
Sue Young, a Meta vice president of product management, said the fact that Meta’s chatbot is embedded within social media apps enables the company to differentiate itself from its rivals.
“We wanted to make sure that we had that diversity — we didn’t go with one default [voice],” Young said. “Given the different markets and different people using our products, [we wanted] to make sure that we had a voice that resonated with them.”
Young said Meta created “multiyear” deals with the voice actors but declined to say how much they were paid.
The rejiggered chatbot will be available on the company’s Messenger, Facebook and WhatsApp apps along with Instagram’s direct messages, the company said.
The addition of celebrity voices builds on Meta’s personality-driven approach to AI. Last year, the company launched 28 AI-powered chatbots, played by celebrities and cultural figures such as Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner and Naomi Osaka — a project that was scrapped after it failed to gain traction. This year, Meta started rolling out AI Studio on Instagram, a product that allows everyday users and creators to make their own chatbots.
Other efforts to add voices to chatbots have stalled. In May, OpenAI paused its project to add a voice option to ChatGPT after actress Scarlett Johansson alleged the artificial intelligence start-up copied her voice after she refused to license it to the company. Amazon started using celebrities such as actors Samuel L. Jackson and Melissa McCarthy in its Alexa assistant in 2019 — only to scrap the project three years later.
But Meta is betting that the popularity of Instagram and Facebook will propel its chatbot. The company started adding Meta AI to the top of search boxes on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger this year.
Meta said Wednesday that more than 400 million people are using Meta AI every month, with 185 million people using it across its products each week. Zuckerberg has predicted Meta AI will be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of this year but has warned Wall Street that it could take years before the company’s investment in AI fully materializes.
“It was a bit of a brute force strategy, putting Meta AI inside of their family of apps,” Bernstein senior internet analyst Mark Shmulik said in an interview before the event. “It kind of feels like they’re using it as a learning opportunity.”
Meta said Wednesday that it will add an image-generating tool into users’ news feeds, Stories and Facebook profile pictures. Meta’s AI will also suggest captions for Stories on Facebook and Instagram. The company introduced the latest version of its large language model, known as Llama 3.2 — including a lightweight, text-only model that is tailored for mobile devices.
Meta is experimenting with a new tool that uses AI to automatically translate languages in its short-form video product reels, adjusting speakers’ voices and the movement of their lips to match.
Meta also unveiled two versions of Meta Quest 3S, its latest mixed-reality headset blending the virtual and physical worlds together. The company’s device starts at $299 — far cheaper than Apple’s Vision Pro, which sells for more than $3,000.
“From watching your favorite TV shows on a cinema-sized screen to your own personal trainer that you can take with you anywhere you go, plus multitasking capabilities, gaming, and more, there’s no better device on the market at this price,” the company said about the device in a blog post.