Author: TechBrunch

At the Meta Connect 2024 conference, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is developing a “neural interface” that can be used to control its prototype Orion AR glasses. The interface, which appears to be inspired by devices developed by CTRL-Labs, a brain-machine interface company that Meta acquired in 2019, takes the form of a wrist-worn wearable device that allows wearers to use gestures to control apps on paired Orion Glasses while wearing the wristband-like peripheral. “[Orion is] “This is the first device to feature our wrist-based neural interface,” Zuckerberg said.[This is a] Just sending a signal from the brain…

Meta AI is one of the most used AI assistants in the world, with “almost” 500 million monthly active users, Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday at Meta Connect 2024. Zuckerberg said Meta AI is on track to become the most used assistant in the world. “We're at almost 500 million monthly activities, and we're not yet launched in some of the biggest countries,” Zuckerberg said at the event, noting that the service has not yet launched in the EU. Meta has previously said it has more than 400 million monthly users globally. The company's CFO Susan Lee said during the company's…

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,…