Meta unveils celebrity AI chatbots featuring Matildas captain Sam Kerr, and smart glasses that live stream from your face

(AP) -- Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — has unveiled new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, smart streaming glasses and a refreshed mixed reality headset, as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg continues to push his vision for a virtual reality known as “the metaverse”.

Among the new chatbots is one embodied by Australian soccer star and Matildas captain Sam Kerr, alongside a group of other celebrities and social media influencers.
Let’s take a look at the big product and service announcements from Meta’s Connect developer conference, and when Australian users can expect to try them.
Speaking in a live-streamed event from Meta’s California headquarters, Mr Zuckerberg introduced the company’s first consumer-facing generative AI products, including a chatbot called Meta AI which can generate both text responses and photo-realistic images.
The chatbot — which is still in beta form, and only available in the United States at the time of writing — will be accessed through Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp.
There is also a range of AI characters who Mr Zuckerberg calls “a bit more fun”, including one in which Kerr plays a “free-spirited friend” named Sally.
Meta says there are 28 AI chatbots being developed, including others played by celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner, and Naomi Osaka. They also have their own social media accounts.
“These are just a few we have trained, there are a lot more coming,” Mr Zuckerberg says.
There are more than a dozen completely AI-generated characters as well, which Meta says specialise in different topics “including games, food, travel, humour, creativity and connection”.
The company says it is building software “that will be released in the coming year” which will allow anyone to create their own AI chatbot.
Meta’s AI bots use large language model technology similar to that in other chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing and Copilot.
Mr Zuckerberg says Meta AI will also have access to real-time search information through a partnership with Bing.
Here’s an animation showing how Meta says the bots will look:
Meta says some of its users will soon be able to use a photo-realistic image generation tool called Emu to generate images and stickers.
Some images from Emu are already appearing on social media with watermarks that indicate they’ve been created by AI.
Meta says it is also experimenting with invisible watermarks and other techniques “to reduce the chances of people mistaking them for human-generated content”.
Meta global affairs president (and former deputy prime minister of the UK) Nick Clegg told Reuters news agency that the company had taken steps to filter private details from the data used to train the AI model and also imposed restrictions on what the tool could generate, like a ban on the creation of realistic images of public figures.
“We’ve tried to exclude datasets that have a heavy preponderance of personal information,” Mr Clegg said, citing LinkedIn as an example of a website whose content was deliberately excluded.
Image generation will be part of Meta AI chatbot available in the US, but AI stickers are expected to roll out to some other English-language users over the next month in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook.
Meta also introduced the next version of its smart glasses, made in collaboration with Ray-Ban.
The new iteration will let users record video or photos, live stream, listen to music and interact with the Meta AI assistant (initially in the US).
“Smart glasses are the ideal form factor for you to let an AI assistant see what you are seeing and hear what you are hearing,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
A software update planned for next year will supposedly give the glasses the ability to identify places and objects that wearers are seeing, as well as to perform language translation.
Mr Zuckerberg detailed the latest version of Meta’s Quest mixed reality headset, the Quest 3 — which will cost US$799.99 in Australia when it launches in October.
In an apparent nod to the upcoming release of a much more expensive headset from Apple, Meta’s CEO called Quest 3 “the first mainstream mixed reality headset”, and said it wouldn’t have a separate battery pack or wires.
Meta first announced the Quest 3 earlier this year, around the time Apple debuted its Vision Pro headset, which will start at US$US3,499 (US$5,494) when it launches in the US in early 2024.
The Quest 3 boasts the same mixed-reality technology that premiered in Meta’s more expensive Quest Pro device last year, which shows wearers a video feed of the real world around them, and allows them to bring in digital objects.

(Latest Update September 29, 2023)