With AI, Meta wants to generate virtual friends in WhatsApp and Instagram
With its AI, Meta wants to allow you to chat with avatars with personality and a specific field of expertise so that conversations become more fun on WhatsApp, Instagram or even Messenger. With this in mind, these characters are played by celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton and MrBeast.
The Meta Connect conference was an opportunity to learn more about Meta’s projects around artificial intelligence. Get ready for Emu, a Midjourney alternative capable of creating 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 thus wants to exploit the same base as Meta AI to create kinds of avatars. Each one having their nickname, their field of expertise and their personality. AI “that are a little more fun to interact with» in short. “Besides Meta AI, there are 28 other AIs with which you can send messages on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. You can think of these AIs as a new group of characters, all with a unique story“, we read in the press release.
In other words, the AI here generates kinds of virtual friends since Meta promises that these avatars should give “the feeling of talking to familiar people“. But wait, it doesn’t stop there!
This is the story of an AI, of Meta and Snoop Dogg
To make these avatars a little more concrete, a large number of them are embodied by celebrities (actor, athlete, artist, influencer, etc.).
Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated a virtual role-playing game with an avatar called Dungeon Master and played by… Snoop Dogg. The technology is undoubtedly most impressive, but you should know that the rapper’s face is simply displayed in a thumbnail and simply reacts to your interactions with a few facial expressions. Not sure this is the best way to embark on an epic adventure.
The avatar therefore does not yet speak, which lessens the interest in seeing it embodied by a public figure. To tell the truth, we weren’t entirely comfortable during this part of the conference. We can still imagine that at least some voice interactions could be activated in the future when this experience linked to AI becomes a little more refined.
In beta in the United States
Among the celebrities who lend their faces, we can notably cite Charli D’Amelio, Kendall Jenner, MrBeast, Paris Hilton and Tom Brady. Each of them embodies an avatar specialized in a field. It remains to be seen whether this vision appeals or not.
This AI experience is now being deployed in the United States in a beta version.
