Celebrity voices can do a lot for a product, but Meta is turning the voices of several celebrities into the literal voices of its Meta AI assistant. John Cena, Kristen Bell, Awkwafina, Keegan-Michael Key, and Judi Dench may not be your real friends, but you'll soon be able to chat with their synthetic voice clones as much as you like, according to a report from Meta. Reuters. Meta is expected to announce that those celebrities, and potentially more, will be the ones you hear when you converse with the AI chatbot.
If celebrity voices for an AI chatbot seem like a gimmick, well, that’s because they are. But as generative AI assistants continue to emerge in an already crowded field, the tricks could help Meta attract interest as it jockeys for position against OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
The deal with the celebrities will allow all of them to be voice options for the AI, adding to the more generic options. The reported mix is interesting because they are all at or near the peak of fame, all have roles that children would recognize, and all have appeared in many adult films and shows.
It’s unclear whether the famous voices will require payment, though celebrities are said to be receiving large salaries for the project. Those checks ensure that Meta won’t face the rancor that OpenAI suffered over accusations that one of ChatGPT’s synthetic voices sounded like Scarlett Johansson in the movie Her.
It's no small matter, as actors and writers went on strike last year largely due to concerns about the possibility of artificial intelligence replacing them. SAG-AFTRA is rumored to have a deal with Meta to use actors' voices, but it hasn't been announced whether that might be related to this celebrity voice plan.
Famous or crazy?
Even if celebrity voices make Meta AI a success, the company won’t be able to rest on its laurels for long. Google has plans to create AI chatbots of famous people and fictional characters on YouTube. Even Meta’s plan to offer you the chance to create a custom AI chatbot based on you is something that Google, Character.ai, and others are pursuing.
Meta’s eagerness to incorporate celebrities into its AI projects makes sense, but the company has had some issues on the front not too long ago. Meta’s Celebrity AI chatbots used celebrity images for the text-based feature of Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp when it went on sale earlier this year. However, if you look now, the chatbots are still there, but without any celebrity branding.
Celebrity voices also tempted Amazon, which gave Alexa the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Melissa McCarthy, Shaquille O'Neal and Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan. A few years after the first test, Amazon removed Alexa's voices.
Still, Meta is expected to show off plenty of AI news at this year's Connect conference, so this may just be the icing on the cake of other news, fueled by the likely enthusiastic celebrity endorsements we'll all be hearing about soon.
