Meta Platforms Inc chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday said the tech giant is putting artificial intelligence (AI) into digital assistants and smart glasses as it seeks to gain lost ground in the AI race.
Zuckerberg made the announcements at the Connect developers conference at Meta’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, the company’s main annual product event.
“Advances in AI allow us to create different [applications] and personas that help us accomplish different things,” Zuckerberg said at the gathering.
Photo: AFP
“And smart glasses are going to eventually allow us to bring all of this together into a stylish form factor that we can wear,” he said
Smart glasses are one of the many ways that tech companies have tried to move beyond the smartphone as a user-friendly device, but so far with little success.
The second-generation Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses made in a partnership with EssilorLuxottica is supposed to have a starting price of US$299 when they hit the market on Oct. 17.
The smart glasses also add the ability for users to stream what they are seeing in real time, Zuckerberg said.
“Smart glasses are the ideal form factor for you to let AI assistants see what you’re seeing and hear what you’re hearing,” he said.
Meta also introduced 28 AI characters that people can message on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram with “personalities” based on celebrities including Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton and YouTube star MrBeast.
Zuckerberg demonstrated an interaction with one such AI character from the stage in a type-written chat, promising that the new bots would soon be voiced.
“This is our first effort at training a bunch of AI that are a bit more fun,” Zuckerberg said.
“But look, this is early stuff and these still have a lot of limitations, which you will see when you use them.”
Meta has taken a much more cautious approach than its rivals Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google to push out AI products, prioritizing small steps and making its in-house models available to developers and researchers.
The company also unveiled the latest version of its Quest virtual reality headset with richer graphics, improved audio and the ability for a wearer to see their surroundings without taking the gear off.
“This is going to be a big game changer and a big capacity improvement for these headsets,” Zuckerberg said.
Quest 3 headsets are priced starting at US$499 and should begin shipping on Oct. 10, according to Meta.
This is substantially cheaper than Apple Inc’s Vision Pro, which is slated to cost a hefty US$3,499 when it becomes available early next year, in the US only.
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