🎤Meta在其Connect活动上宣布，其AI聊天机器人现可提供包括Awkwafina、John Cena、Keegan-Michael Key、Kristen Bell和Dame Judi Dench等名人的语音，仅美国用户可用，也有非名人语音可选。Meta为每位名人支付了数百万美元，但未分享具体合作细节。

📷Meta的聊天机器人现在还能回答关于用户上传照片的问题，比如发送一张蛋糕的图片并询问如何制作，它会提供一个食谱。此外，用户还可以描述对图像的修改需求，如改变服装或替换背景等，Meta会按要求执行。

🤔Meta的这些举措引发了一些争议和思考。比如，此前Meta曾关闭模仿名人的聊天机器人，而其他公司也有类似经历。此外，这种技术的应用存在一些不确定性，其效果和影响有待观察。

Meta is adding conversational voices by celebrities to its AI chatbot in Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook.

The company announced at its Connect event today that you can now talk to Meta AI and hear it respond in one of several voices, including celebrity soundalikes such as Awkwafina, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristen Bell, and the only one I truly care about: Dame Judi Dench.

These celebrity voices will only be available to US users of Meta’s apps to start. And if you prefer a voice that is a little more mundane, you can also pick from non-celeb voices with names like “Aspen,” “Atlas,” or “Clover.” Google and OpenAI also now offer similar conversational experiences that ostensibly aren’t based on celebrity voices.

If your first thought here was “Gee, that sounds a lot like that Scarlett Johansson thing that OpenAI did,” you’re right — expect that, rather than debuting an AI voice that just coincidentally sounds like one of the world’s highest-paid actors, Meta is explicitly announcing celebrity partnerships, which likely involve payment or some other deal.

Meta hasn’t shared those details, but the company has paid each celebrity “millions of dollars” for their voices, according to The Wall Street Journal. And in negotiations, some of the people reportedly wanted to limit what their voices could say and to make sure they weren’t liable if Meta AI was used.

Meanwhile, Meta recently shut down its chatbots that emulate celebrities like Tom Brady on Instagram, while Amazon used celebrity voices like Samuel L. Jackson or Shaq for Alexa before shutting them down last year, too.

Meta’s AI updates aren’t just about voice conversations. Its chatbot will also now “answer questions about your photos” when you upload images. Send a picture of a cake, ask how to make it, and it’ll grab you a recipe that hopefully does just that.

And if you want something “added, changed, or removed” from an image, Meta says you can describe anything from “changing your outfit to replacing the background with a rainbow,” and it’ll carry out that request.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

In the above examples from our hands-on testing, Meta AI changed the color of a T-shirt. It’s not clear what, if any, guardrails there are on this experience. With Google AI, we have plenty of examples of what this sort of tech can do, for better or worse, and we’ll see sometime in the next year how Apple manages it, too.