Facebook owner Meta prepared on Wednesday to kick off its annual Connect conference at its California headquarters, where it is expected to preview its first augmented reality glasses and announce updates to its existing virtual reality and artificial intelligence products.
Among those AI updates is an audio upgrade offering users the option to select a voice for Meta’s ChatGPT-like chatbot, including the ability to make it sound like celebrities including Judi Dench and John Cena, Reuters reported on Monday.
The augmented reality reveal is a long time in the making for Meta Chief Executive Mark 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
