With its AI, Meta wants to allow you to chat with avatars with personality and a specific area of expertise, making conversations on WhatsApp, Instagram or even Messenger more fun. That’s why these characters are played by celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton and MrBeast.
Virtual Friends powered by Meta AI // Source: Meta
The Meta Connect conference was an opportunity to learn more about Meta’s artificial intelligence projects. Get ready for Emu, a midjourney alternative that lets you create stickers for Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as Meta AI, a new competitor to ChatGPT and Google Bard.
Meta is already imagining some experiments around these new AIs. The company therefore wants to use the same basis as Meta AI to create types of avatars. Everyone has their nickname, their specialty and their personality. AIs “that are a little more fun to interact with,” in short. “In addition to Meta AI, there are 28 other AIs that can be used to send messages on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. “You can think of these AIs as a new group of characters, each with a unique story,” the statement said.
In other words, the AI is generating a kind of virtual friends here, as Meta promises that these avatars should “give the impression of talking to familiar people.” But wait, that’s not all!
This is the story of an AI, of Meta and Snoop Dogg
To make these avatars a little more concrete, many of them are embodied by celebrities (actors, athletes, artists, influencers, etc.).
Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated a virtual role-playing game with an avatar called Dungeon Master, played by… Snoop Dogg. The technology is undoubtedly the most impressive, but you should know that the rapper’s face simply appears in a thumbnail and simply responds to your interactions with a few facial expressions. I’m not sure this is the best way to start an epic adventure.
Rapper Snoop Dogg plays the Dungeon Master avatar in a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg // Source: Meta
The avatar therefore does not yet speak, which reduces the interest in seeing it embodied in a public figure. To be honest, we didn’t feel completely comfortable during this part of the conference. We can still imagine that at least some voice interactions could be enabled in the future as this AI-connected experience is refined a bit.
In beta phase in the USA
Among the celebrities who lend their faces we can mention in particular Charli D’Amelio, Kendall Jenner, MrBeast, Paris Hilton and Tom Brady. Each of them embodies an avatar that specializes in a field. It remains to be seen whether this vision will be accepted or not.
This AI experience is now rolling out in beta in the US.