John Cena and Judi Dench to voice new Meta AI chatbot

Meta has announced a raft of new product offerings for its ChatGPT-like chatbot, including Meta AI, which will now respond to voice commands and offer users the option to make the assistant sound like celebrities including Judi Dench and John Cena.

Meta says it has plans to start automatically injecting personalised images created by the bot into people's Facebook and Instagram feeds.

“I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of interacting with AI than text," Zuckerberg said.

The company said more than 400 million people are using Meta AI monthly, including 185 million who are returning to it weekly.

In keeping with its strategy of sharing the AI models powering its digital agent for mostly free use by others, Meta released three new versions of its Llama 3 models, although it withheld the models from the European Union in light of regulations there.

Meta also announced an entry-level version of its Quest line of mixed-reality headsets, the Quest 3S, which will start at $300 (AED 1000) and cut the price of the Quest 3 introduced last year.

The company has been plowing tens of billions of dollars into its investments in artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other metaverse technologies, driving up its capital expense forecast for 2024 to a record high of between $37 billion (AED 135 billion) and $40 billion (AED 146 billion).

Its metaverse unit Reality Labs lost $8.3 billion (AED 30.4 billion) in the first half of this year, according to the most recent disclosures. It lost $16 billion (AED 59 billion) last year.

Metaa also showed off its first working prototype of augmented-reality glasses, called Orion, during its annual Connect conference on Wednesday, as the California company sketched out its aspirations for products that would bring the virtual world into the real one.