Meta revealed a number of new announcements during its Meta Connect keynote address, including the Meta Quest 3S and Meta Orion AR glasses.
The event also detailed improvements to Meta AI, including giving the AI assistant a voice, at last. Or rather a choice of a number of voices.
The opening keynote for this year's Meta Connect took place on 25 September and there were a number of announcements made during the event. We saw the reveal of the Meta Quest 3S, which had been doing the rumour rounds for several months prior, and Meta also detailed new, full holographic AR glasses in the form of the Meta Orion.
There was something else that happened during Meta Connect though, and while it was overshadowed by the product announcements, it's interesting and worth talking about. Meta's AI is getting smarter and more useful thanks to new multimodal features in Meta's Llama 3.2 models, and that includes finally giving the AI assistant a voice.
You don't just get any voice either – when the feature rolls out, you'll be able to choose from several different speech options for Meta AI, including the AI voices of John Cena, Awkwafina, Dame Judi Dench, Keegan Michael Key and Kristen Bell.
It's probably worth noting here that John Cena will be "coming soon" rather than available immediately as the feature rolls out, but Awkwafina, Dame Judi Dench and Keegan Michael Key are all described as "Medium pitch", while Kristen Bell's voice is described as "High pitch".
Along with getting a voice, the updates to Meta AI include the ability to use your voice to talk to the assistant on Messenger, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram DMs, and it will reply out loud (in the voice you choose), answering questions and explaining various things.
You can also share images in chats with Meta AI and it will be able to understand the image and give you more information, such as what type of dog or flower is in the photo, or a recipe for a cake you have shared and asked how to make. Meta AI will also be able to help you edit photos and add backgrounds to your Instagram Stories based on the image you're sharing.
Meta didn't announce when the new Meta AI features, including the voice functionality, will be rolling out but we will keep you updated as we learn more.
In the words of John Cena, "My time is now!", so hopefully it won't be too long to wait. You might not be able to see him, but you'll certainly hear his dulcet tones.
