Meta's AI Now Lets You Chat in the Voices of Awkwafina, John Cena, and Judi Dench

Meta is introducing celebrity voices to its AI chatbot across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Announced at its Connect event, users can now interact with Meta AI, which responds using voices of various celebrities like Awkwafina, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristen Bell, and Dame Judi Dench. Initially, these voice features will be exclusive to US users.

For those desiring a more neutral tone, Meta offers non-celebrity options with names like "Aspen," "Atlas," and "Clover." This move echoes similar conversational experiences launched by Google and OpenAI, emphasizing that Meta is explicitly partnering with celebrities, likely involving financial agreements. Reports indicate that the company has compensated each celebrity "millions of dollars" for their voices.

Interestingly, Meta has recently discontinued chatbots that mimic celebrities like Tom Brady on Instagram. Before this, Amazon also utilized celebrity voices, such as Samuel L. Jackson and Shaquille O'Neal, for Alexa, only to cease these features last year.

In addition to voice interactions, Meta’s AI chatbot now offers functionalities like answering questions based on uploaded photos. For example, if you share an image of a cake and ask for a recipe, it will provide one tailored to your request. Furthermore, the AI can alter images based on your descriptions, allowing for changes from outfits to backgrounds.

In hands-on tests, Meta AI demonstrated its capabilities by changing the color of a T-shirt. The specifics regarding any limitations of this technology remain unclear. As similar advancements in AI continue to evolve, it will be interesting to see how Apple approaches these features over the next year.