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Meta expected to preview first true AR glasses at Connect

conference

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AI updates include celebrity voices for Meta's chatbot

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First commercial AR glasses expected to ship in 2027,

source

says

By Katie Paul

MENLO PARK, California, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Meta

Platforms ( META ) expanded its bet on artificial intelligence,

announcing a raft of new product offerings for its ChatGPT-like

chatbot and plans to start automatically injecting personalized

images created by the bot into people's Facebook and Instagram

feeds, as it kicked off its annual Connect conference at its

California headquarters on Wednesday.

The Facebook owner also announced a new entry-level version

of its Quest line of mixed-reality headsets, the Quest 3S, and

is expected to preview its first augmented-reality glasses and

announce updates to its existing virtual-reality and

artificial-intelligence products.

Among the AI updates announced was an audio upgrade to the

digital assistant, called Meta AI, which will now respond to

voice commands and offer users the option to make the assistant

sound like celebrities including Judi Dench and John Cena.

"I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of

interacting with AI than text," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

The company said more than 400 million people are using Meta

AI monthly, including 185 million who are returning to it

weekly.

In keeping with its strategy of sharing the AI models

powering its digital agent for free use by others, Meta released

three new versions of its Llama 3 models. Two of the models are

multimodal, meaning they can understand both images and text,

while the third is a basic text-only model capable of running

entirely on a user's device, a key privacy advantage.

The augmented-reality reveal is a long time in the making

for Zuckerberg, who positioned AR technology as a sort of magnum

opus when he first pivoted the world's biggest social media

company toward building immersive "metaverse" systems in 2021.

However, Meta has struggled to overcome technical challenges

with its AR project since then, prompting the head of the

company's metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division to

acknowledge last year that a product it could viably bring to

market was "still a few years away - a few, to put it lightly."

The company has been plowing tens of billions of dollars

into its investments in artificial intelligence, augmented

reality and other metaverse technologies, driving up its capital

expense forecast for 2024 to a record high of between $37

billion and $40 billion.

Its metaverse unit Reality Labs lost $8.3 billion in the

first half of this year, according to the most recent

disclosures. It lost $16 billion last year.

The social media giant is planning for the first generation

of the AR glasses this year to be distributed only internally

and to a select group of developers, with each device costing

tens of thousands of dollars to produce, according to a source

familiar with the project.

Meta aims to ship its first commercial AR glasses to

consumers in 2027, by which point technical breakthroughs should

bring down the cost of production, the source said.

The source spoke on condition of anonymity because they were

not authorized to discuss company plans.

Zuckerberg appeared to confirm that approach, describing the

AR work and telling an audience at a live taping of the Acquired

podcast in San Francisco that Meta was "pretty close to being

able to show off the first prototype that we have of that."

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on

the plans.

In the meantime, Meta has leaned in to an unexpected interim

success on the road to AR with its camera-equipped Ray-Ban Meta

smart glasses.

Riding a wave of excitement around emerging generative AI

technology, the company announced at last year's Connect

conference that it was adding an AI-powered digital assistant to

the glasses, turning a once-forgotten device into the most

popular AI wearable on the market.

Although Meta has not disclosed sales numbers for the smart

glasses, the CEO of Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica

said this summer that more of the new generation sold in a few

months than the old ones did in two years. Market research firm

IDC estimates that more than 700,000 pairs of the glasses have

shipped since the update last year.

Meta recently extended its partnership with EssilorLuxottica and

contemplated a possible investment in the eyewear company,

prompting speculation that the AR glasses may also bear the

Ray-Ban name. More immediately, Meta's road map for the smart

glasses includes plans for a next generation that will feature a

viewfinder capable of displaying basic text and images through

the lenses.

It has been shipping software updates this year enhancing

the AI assistant's capabilities on the existing glasses,

including an update in April that enabled the agent to identify

and converse about objects seen by the wearer.

Set to hit shelves on Oct. 15, the Quest 3S headset will be

offered in two storage capacity sizes, the smaller one priced at

$299.99 and the other at $399.99.

With the launch, the company is discontinuing its older

Quest 2 and high-end Quest Pro devices, while also dropping the

price of the more powerful Quest 3 it introduced last year from

$649.99 to $499.99.