Meta AI, Snoop Dogg, etc: the big AI announcements of Meta Connect

Meta’s new Ray-Ban connected glasses will be the first hardware product to integrate an artificial intelligence robot. June Wan/ZDNET

During Wednesday’s Meta Connect event, the company announced several new AI services that will soon be available on its various platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Above all, Meta announces that it has finally launched itself into the race for AI chatbots by unveiling one of its own — Meta AI.

ZDNET has collected all the major AI announcements, as well as some fun bonuses, in the list below.

1. Meta AI

Meta

It’s hard to believe it given the recent popularity of OpenAI, but Meta has long been a leader in the field of AI, developing advanced models, especially for its chatbots, long before the craze for generative AI began. Despite this work, Meta has kept away from what the other tech giants were doing, and refrained from launching an AI chatbot following the launch of ChatGPT last November. Until 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. Thanks to a partnership with Microsoft, Meta AI will provide users with real-time information on the web via Bing.

The chatbot will also be equipped with Emu, Meta AI’s image generator, which will generate high-quality images in a few seconds on all Meta’s chat platforms: WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. This means that users can generate images from text directly in their conversations.

To solicit Meta’s AI, users can start a message with @MetaAI in a conversation/discussion thread, whether via their smartphone, tablet or personal computer.

The chatbot will also soon be available in the Meta Ray-Ban and Meta Quest 3 connected glasses.

2. Different AI for different things

Meta

In addition to Meta AI, the company has created 28 different Ais that present different personalities and characters to meet unique needs. For example, a user can chat with a cook to get culinary advice or with a copywriter to get help writing.

Chatbots are supposed to give the impression of chatting with a real person, which makes the experience more interactive and more intimate for the user and gives the chatbot a human quality. Meta has also paid an unknown (but certainly high) amount to convert celebrities into characters, including Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Naomi Osaka, Chris Paul, Paris Hilton, Kendall Jenner or 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, which means that some answers may be outdated.

The chatbots are available in beta version 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 ais and interact with them thanks to familiar and inviting personalities and characters. Who wouldn’t want to have an intimate conversation with Snoop Dogg?

3. Meta AI Studio

Meta

In addition to AI robots, Meta allows users to train and create their own AI robots so that each of them can offer tailor-made experiences.

The Meta AI Studio will allow users to create chatbots, including for those who do not code.

For example, a creator can create a chatbot that reproduces his character to interact with his followers. Or, a small company can train an AI capable of helping it in its customer service tasks. Users can also create NPCs (non-playable characters) in the metaverse for more populated VR experiences.

Meta also shares an API allowing users to create chatbots dedicated to its messaging applications and services.

4. The editing of photos by the AI on Instagram

Meta

Among the popular social media platforms, Instagram is not the first to integrate generative AI functions. But its latest tool could give Snapchat and LinkedIn a hard time.

Starting next month, Instagram will have two new AI features for image editing: Restyle and Background, allowing users to transform their images by typing quick and 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 turned a photo of his dog into an origami-style image.

5. Stickers Have

Meta

Facebook Instagram Stickers Thanks to 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 start rolling out next month for some English-speaking users.

Source: “ZDNet.com ” and “ZDNet.com “