Meta Platforms Inc chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday said the tech giant is putting artificial intelligence (AI) into digital assistants and smart glasses as it seeks to gain lost ground in the AI race.
Zuckerberg made the announcements at the Connect developers conference at Meta’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, the company’s main annual product event.
“Advances in AI allow us to create different [applications] and personas that help us accomplish different things,” Zuckerberg said at the gathering.
Photo: AFP
“And smart glasses are going to eventually allow us to bring all of this together into a stylish form factor that we can wear,” he said
Smart glasses are one of the many ways that tech companies have tried to move beyond the smartphone as a user-friendly device, but so far with little success.
The second-generation Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses made in a partnership with EssilorLuxottica is supposed to have a starting price of US$299 when they hit the market on Oct. 17.
The smart glasses also add the ability for users to stream what they are seeing in real time, Zuckerberg said.
“Smart glasses are the ideal form factor for you to let AI assistants see what you’re seeing and hear what you’re hearing,” he said.
Meta also introduced 28 AI characters that people can message on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram with “personalities” based on celebrities including Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton and YouTube star MrBeast.
Zuckerberg demonstrated an interaction with one such AI character from the stage in a type-written chat, promising that the new bots would soon be voiced.
“This is our first effort at training a bunch of AI that are a bit more fun,” Zuckerberg said.
“But look, this is early stuff and these still have a lot of limitations, which you will see when you use them.”
Meta has taken a much more cautious approach than its rivals Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google to push out AI products, prioritizing small steps and making its in-house models available to developers and researchers.
The company also unveiled the latest version of its Quest virtual reality headset with richer graphics, improved audio and the ability for a wearer to see their surroundings without taking the gear off.
“This is going to be a big game changer and a big capacity improvement for these headsets,” Zuckerberg said.
Quest 3 headsets are priced starting at US$499 and should begin shipping on Oct. 10, according to Meta.
This is substantially cheaper than Apple Inc’s Vision Pro, which is slated to cost a hefty US$3,499 when it becomes available early next year, in the US only.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS