Meta presented a host of new products and services at the annual Meta Connect conference on Wednesday, including the Meta Quest 3 mixed reality headset and smart glasses made in collaboration with Ray-Ban. In addition to the hardware, the company also announced its own AI assistant, Meta AI, and a variety of AI experiences across Meta’s line of apps and devices, including AI stickers in Meta apps and AI editing tools for Instagram. Meta AI, a conversational generative AI assistant similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing, will be available on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
Meta AI will be powered by the company’s custom model that borrows from Meta’s large language model, Llama 2. The AI assistant, Meta said, will provide real-time information in response to text-based queries, scouring the Internet via Bing searches. Meta AI also generates images based on text prompts. The AI assistant can help you plan hiking trips with your friends in a group chat, prepare recipes or create your shopping list. Users can type “@MetaAI /imagine” into their chat box and follow it up with descriptive text prompts about what they want the AI assistant to do. Meta AI is also coming to the company’s latest devices, the Meta Quest 3 and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
In addition to the standard AI assistant, the company also showed AI avatars with different personalities. Meta brings 28 AI characters, each with a unique backstory and behavior. These AI characters can be conversed with in WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, and will also include some public figures and influencers Meta has collaborated with due to their similarities. Famous people coming as AI characters include Dwayne Wade, Kendall Jenner, Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg and more.
Meta calls its image generation tool “expressive media universe,” or Emu. The tool can also quickly generate AI stickers from a user’s text prompts in apps like WhatsApp or Instagram, to share with friends. “It’s high quality and photorealistic,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the presentation. “But one of the coolest things is that the Emu generates so quickly. It’s not a minute. It takes five seconds to generate one of these,” he added. This custom sticker generation feature will be rolled out to select English-speaking users across WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook Stories over the next month.
The Facebook parent is also releasing new AI-powered image editing tools, specifically two new features – Restyle and Background – that use technology from the Emu tool. Restyle acts as a kind of custom filter that works based on user prompts. Based on a single description or a more detailed question, Restyle will edit your images to reflect a particular mood. And as the name suggests, Background allows users to change the background of their images based on custom prompts. Images created with both tools have flags indicating that the image was generated by AI. Meta said Restyle and Background will be coming to Instagram soon, but didn’t give a concrete release date for that.