Meta AI gets more useful—with voice, images and more.
Here's what you need to know about Zuckerberg's AI announcements at Meta Connect
Published 2024-12-11
Zuckerberg announced a ton of impressive upgrades to Meta’s AI products and models at Meta Connect—including four new Llama models, AI features for creators, and voice and image capabilities in Meta AI.
What's going on here?
Meta AI is going multimodal with upgrades across both products and models.
What does this mean?
First off, you can now use voice to chat with Meta AI on Messenger, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram DMs, and it'll respond out loud. We get the option to choose from different voices, including celebrities like Awkwafina, John Cena, and Kristen Bell.
Plus, Meta AI can understand photos we share in chats. These features are powered by two new Llama 3.2 models that are multimodal (i.e., they can understand images). Alongside these, there are two lightweight text-only Llamas that can run locally on small devices like mobiles.
To quickly list other upgrades:
- Auto-dubbed Reels: Reels can now be auto-dubbed with lip-sync between English and Spanish, breaking language barriers for content creators.
- AI Creator Avatars: Creators can use Meta's free AI Studio to generate realistic video avatars of themselves to interact with fans.
- AI-Generated Chat Themes: You can now create personalized chat themes using AI in Messenger and Instagram DMs.
- Expanded AI Tools for Businesses: Businesses can build AI assistants to chat with customers, offer support, and facilitate sales directly within WhatsApp and Messenger.
- Meta AI-Generated Content in Feeds: You might start seeing AI-generated images personalized for you in your Facebook and Instagram feeds.
Why should you care?
Zuckerberg shared that Meta now has over 500 million monthly active users engaging with Meta AI. He's literally making frontier-level models free to use in Meta’s products and shaping the vision of how AI integrates into daily life—especially with their work on the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.
And let's not forget the new Orion AR glasses prototype from Meta, which is bonkers. It's a full-fledged AR headset that brings us closer to the future of true augmented reality. Zuckerberg has been working on this for almost a decade, and while it's not yet a consumer product, the technology is advancing rapidly.
I'd say OpenAI and Google need to watch out in the consumer race for AI.