Meta has added the voices of several celebrities to its AI chatbot on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, as announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the Meta Connect event.
Previously, users could only interact with Meta's AI through Ray-Ban smart glasses. Now, notable voices include John Cena, Christian Bale, and Awkwafina.
This feature will initially be available only to American users of Meta's apps. In a similar move, OpenAI had previously added a voice resembling actress Scarlett Johansson's to its chatbot, leading to a lawsuit from Johansson.
It appears that contracts have been signed with the celebrities mentioned, as reports indicated that millions of dollars were paid to each for the use of their voices.
Meta's AI updates extend beyond voice conversations; the chatbot can now also answer questions related to user-uploaded photos. Users can send an image and ask about various aspects within it.
Zuckerberg noted that users can easily add, change, or remove objects in images using text commands.
The new capabilities are powered by Meta's Llama 3.2 model, which is the first version to include visual capabilities. According to Zuckerberg, it can bridge the gap between vision and language by extracting details from images and understanding scenes to create descriptive sentences.
Meta claims that Llama 3.2 is competitive in image recognition and a range of visual understanding tasks compared to ChatGPT and Claude.