By Katie Paul

NEW YORK – Facebook owner Meta Platforms is planning to announce this week that it has secured deals with actors including Judi Dench, Kristen Bell and John Cena to give voice to its Meta AI chatbot, a source familiar with the company’s plans told Reuters on Monday.

The new audio feature will offer users the option to select a voice for Meta’s ChatGPT-like digital assistant from a list of five celebrities, who also include Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key, as well as several generic voice options, the person told Reuters.

The social media giant is set to announce the audio capabilities at its annual Connect conference, which starts on Wednesday, the person said.

Meta is also expected to unveil a first version of its augmented-reality glasses at Connect this year and to discuss its road map for other hardware devices like its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which last year became its first product to include an audio version of the Meta AI chatbot.

The celebrity voices will start launching in the U.S. and other English-speaking markets this week across Meta’s family of apps, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the source told Reuters.

Bloomberg first reported earlier this summer that Meta was in discussions with celebrities about using their voices for AI projects.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a promotional video featuring Cena on Instagram last week, showing the two men and several others engaging in stunts while wearing the Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

Meta has been racing to push out generative artificial intelligence products to its billions of users, as it competes against Microsoft-backed ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google to dominate the emerging technology. As part of that, the company has been adding capabilities to its chatbot and pushing to make it a more prominent part of the experience of using its apps.

OpenAI showed off a similar audio feature for its chatbot in May, but quickly ran into trouble when actor Scarlett Johansson accused the company of making it sound “eerily similar” to her even though she had declined to lend her voice to the project.

Meta’s assistant is currently capable of engaging in text chats and generating images in response to user prompts. The company last year experimented with bringing star power to the project by launching text-based “character” versions of the chatbot inspired by celebrities like Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg, although those never appeared to gain traction with users.

Meta has since shifted focus to an AI Studio product that enables content creators on its platforms to create chatbot versions of themselves. – Reuters