NEW YORK, Sept 24: Facebook owner Meta Platforms is expected to announce this week that it has secured deals with actors including Judi Dench, Kristen Bell, and John Cena to provide voices for its Meta AI chatbot, according to a source familiar with the company’s plans. The new audio feature will allow users to choose from a list of five celebrity voices for Meta’s ChatGPT-like digital assistant, which will also include Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key, alongside several generic voice options, the source told Reuters.

The social media giant is set to reveal the audio capabilities at its annual Connect conference, which begins on Wednesday. Additionally, Meta is expected to introduce a first version of its augmented-reality glasses at Connect this year and discuss its roadmap for other hardware devices, including its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which last year became the first product to feature an audio version of the Meta AI chatbot.

The celebrity voices are scheduled to launch 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 informed Reuters. Bloomberg first reported earlier this summer that Meta was in talks with celebrities about utilizing their voices for AI projects.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a promotional video featuring Cena on Instagram last week, showcasing the two and several others performing stunts while wearing the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The company has been racing to roll out generative artificial intelligence products to its billions of users, competing against Microsoft-backed ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Alphabet's  Google to dominate this emerging technology. To that end, Meta has been enhancing its chatbot's capabilities and pushing to integrate it more prominently into the user experience of its apps.

OpenAI demonstrated a similar audio feature for its chatbot in May but faced backlash when actress Scarlett Johansson accused the company of creating a voice that sounded "eerily similar" to hers, despite her refusal to lend her voice to the project. Currently, Meta's assistant can engage in text chats and generate images based on user prompts. Last year, the company experimented with celebrity-inspired, text-based "character" versions of the chatbot featuring stars like Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg, though these efforts did not seem to resonate with users.

Meta has since shifted its focus to an AI Studio product that allows content creators on its platforms to develop chatbot versions of themselves.