Dame Judi Dench and John Cena will voice the Meta AI chatbot

Instagram owner Meta says Dame Judi Dench and John Cena will be the voice options for its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

Users will also be able to get information from AI versions of Awkwafina, Keegan-Michael Key and Kristen Bell.

Meta will be hoping that its use of celebrity chatbots goes better than its last attempt.

In September 2023, the so-called debuted AI chatbots with ‘personality’modeled after stars like Kendall Jenner and Snoop Dogg, only to pull the plug less than a year later.

During the company’s annual Connect conference, the tech giant’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new approach to celebrity chatbots.

“I think this voice will be a much more natural way to interact with AI than text,” he told participants.

Other new features of the ChatGPT-like chatbot include the ability to recognize objects that users are photographing and provide them with information about them.

The image editing feature will allow users to modify photos by telling Meta AI what changes they want.

The company said that more than 400 million people now use Meta AI monthly, and 185 million of them return to it weekly.

Zuckerberg also unveiled the first working prototype of Meta’s augmented reality (AR) glasses, called Orion.

Showing off Orion’s glasses, Zuckerberg said, “A lot of people said it was the craziest technology they’d ever seen.”

Users will be able to interact with Orion through hand tracking, voice and a wrist-based interface.

Meta has also announced the entry-level version of its Quest line of mixed reality headsets, with prices for the new Quest 3S starting at $300 (£225).

Some of the world’s largest technology companies are developing AR glasses, but have yet to bring commercially successful mass-market devices to market.

In recent years, Meta has pumped billions of dollars into the development of artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other metaverse technologies.

The company expects to spend as much as $40 billion on new projects this year, a record result.

Before the event, Meta shares ended Wednesday’s trading day at a record high of $568.31.

The company, which also owns the social media platforms Facebook and WhatsApp, has seen the value of its shares on the stock exchange increase by over 60% since the beginning of this year.

But ahead of Meta’s annual presentation, thousands of Facebook and Instagram users, including many celebrities, shared a post on Stories that falsely claimed that people had to repost it if they didn’t want the company to use their content to train AI tools.

They included James McAvoy and Tom Brady who fell for the fraud.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed that users can only object to the use of their content by submitting an objection form.

This can be accessed by clicking on the notification sent to users about the plans or by going to the privacy center in your account settings.