Meta showed off a slew of new products and services at its annual Meta Connect conference on Wednesday, including the Meta Quest 3 mixed reality headset and smart glasses produced in partnership with Ray-Ban. In addition to the hardware, the company also announced its own artificial intelligence assistant, Meta AI, as well as a variety of AI experiences in the Meta suite of apps and devices, including AI stickers in the Meta app and AI editing tools for Instagram . Meta AI is a conversational generative artificial intelligence assistant, much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing, that will be available on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
Meta AI will be powered by the company’s custom model, which draws on Meta’s large language model Llama 2. Meta said the AI assistant will provide real-time information in response to text-based queries conducted across the internet via Bing Search. Meta AI will also generate images based on text prompts. An AI assistant can help you plan a hike with friends in a group chat, prepare a recipe, or help you make a shopping list. Users can type “@MetaAI /imagine” into the chat box and use descriptive text prompts to explain what they want the AI assistant to do. Meta AI is also used in the company’s latest devices, the Meta Quest 3 and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
In addition to preset AI assistants, the company also showed off AI avatars with distinctive personalities. Meta brings 28 artificial intelligence characters, each with unique backstories and behaviors. These AI characters can be chatted with in WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, and also include a number of public figures and influencers that Meta has partnered with. Celebrities playing artificial intelligence roles include Dwayne Wade, Kendall Jenner, Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg and more.
Emu can generate stickers based on user prompts
Photo credit: Meta
Meta calls its image generation tool the Expressive Media Universe, or Emu. The tool can also quickly generate AI stickers based on users’ text prompts in applications such as WhatsApp or Instagram for sharing with friends. “It’s high-quality, realistic,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the demo. “But one of the coolest things is how quickly the emu spawns. It’s not like a minute. It takes five seconds to spawn one of these,” he added. This custom sticker generation feature will be rolled out to select English-speaking users in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook Stories next month.
The parent company of Facebook is also bringing new artificial intelligence image editing tools, specifically two new features – restyling and backgrounds – that leverage technology from Emu Tools. Restyles can be used as custom filters that work based on user prompts. Based on a single descriptor or a more detailed prompt, the redesign will edit your image to reflect a specific mood. As the name suggests, Backdrop will allow users to change the background of an image based on custom prompts. Images created using both tools will have a flag indicating that the image was generated by artificial intelligence. Meta said Restyle and Backdrop are coming to Instagram soon, but did not provide a specific release date.
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