Forget Scarlett Johansson – Meta is reportedly spending millions on Hollywood voices for Siri and Google Assistant rival

Meta is asking real celebrities to contribute synthetic voices for future AI projects, according to reports from The New York Times and others. The tech giant reportedly is offering millions of dollars to stars like Awkwafina, Keegan-Michael Key, and Judi Dench in exchange for the rights to use their voices to train AI voice clones. Meta is apparently looking to get the deals done before its Connect 2024 event.

Notably, Scarlett Johansson’s name isn’t on the list of names pursued by Meta. That might be because of recent furor between the actress and OpenAI regarding whether one of its synthetic voices was trained to sound like her a la the movie Her. The company said it wasn’t, but it would understandably make her a hard get for Meta.

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because Meta only recently made a big push for celebrity likenesses backing AI features. The Celebrity AI chatbots were only text-based but were integrated across Meta platforms like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Unfortunately for Meta, the Snoop Dogg Dungeonmaster and Paris Hilton detective didn’t draw a lot of interest, and those chatbots, though still around, are no longer branded with any celebrity’s likeness.

What Meta wants with the celebrity voices isn’t known for sure, but it will likely lead to some form of AI chatbot that could have the voice and, presumably, a digital version of their personality. Getting the voices in time for Connect may be challenging, however, according to the reports. The celebrities and Meta are apparently having trouble agreeing on how long and for what purpose the AI voices may be employed by Meta. While the company obviously wants broad rights, the celebrities and their representatives want to put some strictures in place beforehand. 

Actors and writers have just finished two major strikes where the role of AI was a significant component. People in entertainment fear that AI could replace their work, or at least that executives think it could. Still, industry unions may be finding ways to secure benefits for their members with regard to AI. SAG-AFTRA has supposedly reached its own agreement with Meta for the use of actors’ voices that might entail a universal scale of pay like the one in place for pretty much every other acting contract.

The Elusive Tech/Celeb Blend

Meta is not alone in looking to the future of AI and celebrities, though. Google has been working on creating AI chatbots of famous people and fictional characters, too. In that case, the AI celebrities will be a template for users to customize personalities and appearances for their own AI chatbots. Both of these ideas are represented by the likes of Character.ai, an early proponent of custom chatbots based on famous and fictional people.

All of those companies might be more cautious if they consider what happened with Amazon Alexa and the voice assistant’s attempt to invest in celebrity voices. After early experiments in 2019 with Samuel L. Jackson (in both family-friendly and uncensored forms) succeeded, Amazon started expanding the program in 2020 with the addition of Melissa McCarthy and Shaquille O’ Neal and Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan in 2021. Amazon even built a recording studio at Shaq’s house for him as part of the deal. The advent of generative AI may or may not have impacted the success of those voices, but by mid-2023, those celebrity voices were removed from Alexa. Companies understand that people like fun tech and that people like celebrities. They just seem to struggle with finding a blend that has similar appeal.

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