At Meta Connect 2024 on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to discuss his company’s latest advancements in artificial intelligence. In what he describes as “probably the biggest AI news that we have,” Zuckerberg unveiled Natural Voice Interactions, a direct competitor to Google’s Gemini Live and OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode.
“I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of interacting with AI than text,” Zuckerberg commented. “I think it has the potential to be one of [the], if not the most frequent, ways that we all interact with AI.” Zuckerberg also announced that the new feature will begin rolling out to users today across all of Meta’s major apps including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook.
“Meta AI differentiates itself in this category by not just offering state-of-the-art AI models, but also unlimited access to those models for free integration easily into our different products and apps,” Zuckerberg said. “Meta AI is on track to being the most used AI assistant in the world. We’re almost at 500 million monthly actives and we haven’t even launched in some of the bigger countries yet.”
As with Gemini Live and Advanced Voice Mode, Natural Voice Interactions allows users to forgo text prompts and speak directly with the chatbot. Users can stutter, correct themselves, interrupt the AI, and generally speak as they would with another human and still have the chatbot follow the conversation. The new feature will also allow users to pick the voice of the AI and can choose from a variety of celebrities including John Cena, Dame Judy Dench, Kristen Bell, Keegan Michael Key, and Awkwfina. You may remember that lineup from Meta’s previous incursion into natural language chatting, which was shuttered in August because users found the interactions to be “creepy” and “surreal.”
Zuckerberg provided a live demo of the feature onstage, asking the chatbot a series of softball questions that the AI answered satisfactorily. It’s speaking cadence appeared a bit stilted and less conversational than what we’ve seen from Advanced Voice Mode, but was still far better than the monotone intonations you’d get from a Siri response. However, it wasn’t until Zuckerberg referred to the AI as Awkwafina that this reporter discovered that that’s who that character voice was supposed to be.
