Author: TechBrunch

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced updates to the company's Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses on Wednesday at Meta Connect 2024. Continuing its case that smart glasses could be the next blockbuster consumer device, Meta announced that the Ray-Ban Meta will come with some new AI capabilities and smartphone-familiar features later this year. New features for Meta include real-time AI video processing and live language translation. Other announcements, such as QR code scanning, reminders, and integration with iHeartRadio and Audible, promise to give Ray-Ban Meta users the smartphone features they already know and love. Meta says its smart glasses will soon have…

As announced at Meta Connect 2024 on Wednesday, Meta will release a new VR app called Hyperscape that will create high-fidelity recreations of real-world spaces and let you explore them while wearing a Quest headset. Hyperscape, available in beta in the US, lets you use your phone to scan a room and then recreate it, or enter a room someone else has scanned and shared with you. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg performed “Hyper Scape” onstage at rock band Green Day's studio. “We're also introducing a photorealistic world to the Metaverse that we're calling Hyper Scape,” Zuckerberg said. “It's pretty wild,…

Canva has announced new enhancements to its developer platform, including the addition of premium apps to its Pro subscription, app translation capabilities, better discovery mechanisms, and new API capabilities. The creative tools company launched its developer program in June 2023 to allow developers to build add-ons that can be used with Canva — think of it as a Chrome extension for Canva — and the company says developers have built more than 300 apps that have been used more than 1 billion times. For example, Meta built the Meta Design Check app to help users apply the company's best creative…

Meta AI is starting to catch up with Google when it comes to AI-powered photo editing. On Wednesday, at its Meta Connect 2024 conference, the tech giant announced that Meta AI will be able to use its AI technology to help you edit your photos and answer questions about the photos you've shared. The additional functionality is made possible by the multimodal capabilities that Meta AI has enabled with its Llama 3.2 model, meaning that you can now share photos as well as text in chats, similar to Google Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT. When you share a photo, Meta AI…

Meta AI's Imagine feature, which uses generative AI to turn text prompts into images, is now expanding to Facebook and Instagram, the company announced Wednesday at Meta Connect 2024. The update will allow users to use the prompts to generate AI photos directly in their feed, stories, and Facebook profile photos. The new feature allows users and creators to generate creative, eye-catching images to accompany their text, helping to draw more attention to their posts and shares. Once the images are shared, friends and followers can see them, react to them, and even copy them, Meta says. Image credit: Meta…

At its Meta Connect 2024 developer conference in Menlo Park on Wednesday, Meta announced it will expand its AI-powered business chatbots to brands on WhatsApp and Messenger with click-to-message ads. Meta said businesses can now set up ad-embedded chatbots to converse with customers, provide support, facilitate orders, and more. “From answering general customer questions to discussing products and completing purchases, these business AIs help businesses engage with more customers and increase sales,” the company wrote in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. Image credit: Meta Meta continues to incorporate AI into more of its advertising products and tools. In May,…

Meta AI, Meta's AI assistant, is getting a new voice mode. At its Meta Connect 2024 developer conference in Menlo Park on Wednesday morning, Meta announced that you can now voice-answer questions across the platforms where its Meta AI is available, including Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Facebook. You can choose from multiple voices, including celebrity AI clones that Meta hired for the purpose (Awkwafina, Judi Dench, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, and Kristen Bell). The new Meta AI voice feature isn't like OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT, which is highly expressive and can pick up the emotive tones of a…

Marvin Prutlab, CEO of the emerging startup Convergence, and his co-founder Andy Tulis (CTO) met while working on recommendation systems and AI assistants at Shopify. The two joined enterprise AI platform Cohere and came up with the idea for the startup a few months ago. [Cohere] “Because we'd been using agents for a few years — three or four years,” Prutlab said. They realized the concept of agents was premature a few years ago. The duo hired talent from Google DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI, and PolyAI, developed the product in just a few months, and attracted significant interest from investors. Currently,…

Meta Connect 2024 is just around the corner, with expected announcements and updates on Meta's latest AI models and metaverse ambitions. The developer-focused event will feature a keynote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is expected to unveil new hardware and software to support Meta's two big ambitions: AI and the metaverse. This could include anything from a new Quest headset, updates to Meta's Llama AI models, and changes to Meta's Facebook, Instagram, and Threads platforms. Meta Connect 2024 will go live at 10am PST and you can stream it on the Meta Connect site, the Meta Developer Facebook page, or,…

In 2019, Microsoft launched Dapr, a new open source project to make it easier for developers to build event-driven distributed applications. Like many popular open source projects, Dapr has spawned its own ecosystem, especially after Microsoft donated it to the Linux Foundation. And as is often the case, some of the creators of Dapr and the related KEDA project have left to start their own companies, including Diagrid, which is launching its fully managed Dapr service in public beta today. The new service, Catalyst, acts as an API platform, giving developers an alternative to managing their own Dapr installations. Image…