Meta’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses will be the first hardware product to integrate an artificial intelligence robot. June Wan/ZDNET
At Wednesday’s Meta Connect event, the company announced several new AI services that will soon be available across its various platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Above all, Meta announces that it has finally entered the race for AI chatbots by unveiling one of its own – Meta AI.
ZDNET has rounded up all the major AI announcements, plus some fun bonuses, in the list below.
1. Meta AI
Meta
It’s hard to believe given OpenAI’s recent popularity, but Meta has long been a leader in the AI field, developing advanced models, including for its chatbots, long before the AI craze. Generative AI begins. Despite this work, Meta stayed away from what other tech giants were doing, and refrained from launching an AI chatbot following the launch of ChatGPT last November. Till today.
The company’s chatbot is called Meta AI and will serve as a standard chatbot capable of answering basic questions and queries, based on LLaMA-2. Through a partnership with Microsoft, Meta AI will provide users with real-time information across the web via Bing.
The chatbot will also feature Emu, Meta AI’s image generator, which will generate high-quality images in seconds across all of Meta’s chat platforms: WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. This means users can generate images from text directly in their conversations.
To engage Meta AI, users can start a message with @MetaAI in a conversation/thread, whether via their smartphone, tablet, or home computer.
The chatbot will also soon be available in the Meta Ray-Ban and Meta Quest 3 smart glasses.
2. Different AI for different things
Meta
In addition to Meta AI, the company has created 28 different AIs that feature different personalities and characters to meet unique needs. For example, a user might chat with a cook for cooking tips or with a copywriter for help with writing.
Chatbots are meant to feel like you’re chatting with a real person, making the experience more interactive and intimate for the user and giving the chatbot a human quality. Meta also paid an unknown (but certainly high) sum to convert celebrities into characters, including Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Naomi Osaka, Chris Paul, Paris Hilton, Kendall Jenner and MrBeast.
After all, who wouldn’t want to have an intimate conversation with Snoop Dogg?
These interactive AIs do not yet have access to real-time information like Meta AI. Meta AI also warns that these AIs have limited databases containing information from before 2023, meaning some answers may be outdated.
The chatbots are available in beta today and will also be accessible on Meta’s chat platforms.
Although these interactive AIs do not have access to real-time information like the new Meta AI platform, they aim to make users want to use the AIs and interact with them through personalities and characters familiar and inviting. Who wouldn’t want to have an intimate conversation with Snoop Dogg?
3. Meta AI Studio
Meta
In addition to AI bots, Meta allows users to train and create their own AI bots so that each of them can deliver tailored experiences.
The Meta AI Studio will allow users to create chatbots, including those who don’t code.
For example, a creator can create a chatbot that mimics their character to interact with their followers. Or, a small business can train an AI that can help with customer service tasks. Users can also create NPCs (non-playable characters) in Metaverses for more populated VR experiences.
Meta also shares an API allowing users to create chatbots dedicated to its messaging apps and services.
4. AI Photo Editing on Instagram
Meta
Among popular social media platforms, Instagram is not the first to integrate generative AI features. But its latest tool could give Snapchat and LinkedIn a run for their money.
Starting next month, Instagram will have two new AI features for image editing: Restyle and Backdrop, allowing users to transform their images by typing quick, descriptive prompts.
With the Restyle tool, users can use prompts to apply visual styles to an image. For example, during a Meta Connect demonstration, Mark Zuckerberg quickly transformed a photo of his dog into an origami-style image.
5. AI Stickers
Meta
Using Emu and LLama2, AI Stickers will allow users to generate stickers from any text prompt on WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook Stories. The feature will begin rolling out next month to some English-speaking users.
Source: “ZDNet.com” and “ZDNet.com”