Meta has secured rights to the voices of actors Judi Dench, Kristen Bell, John Cena and others for its Meta AI chatbot, a ChatGPT-like digital assistant that is part of the plan for conversational AI as part of the multimodal Llama 3.2. Also revealed at Meta Connect this week was Orion, “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen,” queued up to become Meta’s “first consumer full holographic AR glasses,” though they won’t be available anytime soon. A low-priced Quest 3 mixed reality headset, the $299 Quest 3S, will be arriving in time for the holidays, however.

Streamed live from Menlo Park, Meta Connect 2024 “was one for the ages,” enthused Tom’s Guide, waxing approvingly about Orion (“everyone’s blown away by it”), which “will start as a dev kit — mostly internally — but a handful of partners will get their hands on one too.”

The eyewear will include a wrist-based neural interface that “understands your gestures,” Tom’s reports, describing projectors for 2D and 3D in the arms of the glasses that channel content to “nano-printed lenses” that show “the physical world with holograms laid over them.”

TechCrunch does a deep dive, calling the Orion glasses “tiny” and “brain-powered,” but not much beyond the concept stage.

A new iteration of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses will be able to provide information based on computer vision AI input of the world beyond the lenses.

In the accessibility category, working with the Danish mobile app Be My Eyes, the new Ray-Ban Meta line will have the ability to provide people with vision impairment a verbal recount of what’s going on around them. “They can remember things for you, wholesale,” notes The Verge.

“Meta’s large language models (LLMs) can now see,” writes VentureBeat, calling Llama 3.2 a rival to models from Anthropic and OpenAI. It’s the first Meta model that can process images as well as text, per The Verge.

The Ray-Ban Meta glasses last year became “the first product to include an audio version of the Meta AI chatbot,” according to Reuters, which reports that the new versions will be among the platforms with access to the celebrity voices, “launching in the U.S. and other English-speaking markets this week across Meta’s family of apps, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.”

Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key are also on the voice marquee. TechRadar says it’s unclear if the famous voices will require user subscriptions, “though the celebrities are reportedly getting hefty paychecks for the project.” Meta’s voice lineup includes “generic” voices, too.

Yahoo Finance reports “the Quest 3S sports the same full-color mixed-reality capabilities as the Quest 3, albeit with a narrower field of view and a different overall design.” The Verge notes that it offers some improvements over the Quest 3, like longer battery life.

Also in the offing: avatar upgrades. Starting October 1, the improved digital personas will be available “on Meta Horizon OS (its VR operating system), as well as Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger,” explains The Verge, noting that they’re supported by a new tech stack that builds them on skeletal underpinnings. Later this year, users will be able to generate avatars using AI prompts.

Related:
Meta Connect 2024: Everything Revealed in 12 Minutes, CNET Video, 9/25/24