Meta’s AI can now talk to you in the voices of Awkwafina, John Cena, and Judi Dench

3 weeks ago

Meta is adding conversational voices by celebrities to its AI chatbot in Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook.

The company announced at its Connect event today that you can now talk to Meta AI and hear it respond in one of several voices, including celebrity soundalikes such as Awkwafina, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristen Bell, and the only one I truly care about: Dame Judi Dench.

These celebrity voices will only be available to US users of Meta’s apps to start. And if you prefer a voice that is a little more mundane, you can also pick from non-celeb voices with names like “Aspen,” “Atlas,” or “Clover.” Google and OpenAI also now offer similar conversational experiences that ostensibly aren’t based on celebrity voices.

If your first thought here was “Gee, that sounds a lot like that Scarlett Johansson thing that OpenAI did,” you’re right — expect that, rather than debuting an AI voice that just coincidentally sounds like one of the world’s highest-paid actors, Meta is explicitly announcing celebrity partnerships, which likely involve payment or some other deal.

Meta hasn’t shared those details, but the company has paid each celebrity “millions of dollars” for their voices, according to The Wall Street Journal. And in negotiations, some of the people reportedly wanted to limit what their voices could say and to make sure they weren’t liable if Meta AI was used.

Meanwhile, Meta recently shut down its chatbots that emulate celebrities like Tom Brady on Instagram, while Amazon used celebrity voices like Samuel L. Jackson or Shaq for Alexa before shutting them down last year, too.

Meta’s AI updates aren’t just about voice conversations. Its chatbot will also now “answer questions about your photos” when you upload images. Send a picture of a cake, ask how to make it, and it’ll grab you a recipe that hopefully does just that.

And if you want something “added, changed, or removed” from an image, Meta says you can describe anything from “changing your outfit to replacing the background with a rainbow,” and it’ll carry out that request.

A picture of a person holding a phone with a picture of a person wearing a black shirt.

Before: a black shirt.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Picture of a phone with an image of a person on it — the same one from the previous image, but now with a red shirt and illegible text.

After: a red shirt! And... a messed-up version of the shirt’s text and logo.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

In the above examples from our hands-on testing, Meta AI changed the color of a T-shirt. It’s not clear what, if any, guardrails there are on this experience. With Google AI, we have plenty of examples of what this sort of tech can do, for better or worse, and we’ll see sometime in the next year how Apple manages it, too.