I’ve never used Siri. But, this week, I tested out Meta AI Voice and OpenAI’s Advanced Voice. Today, I will give you my first impressions of Meta AI Voice. In short, I found Meta AI Voice very impressive.
First impressions
I played around with Meta AI Voice for a couple days. Initially, I found it to be a bit robotic and cold, especially compared to OpenAI’s Advanced Voice, which struck me as more natural. This difference might be explained in OpenAI’s multimodal training and capabilities, at least according to Ethan Mollick:
Options to use dame judi dench’s voice, or the voices of Kristen Bell, John Cena, Awkwafina, and Keegan-Michael Key
One cool option that Meta AI Voice provides is the ability to choose the voice of a well-known actor or celebrity that Meta hired to provide voice work. These options include: Dame Judi Dench, Kristen Bell, John Cena, Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key.
Of course, I picked Dame Judi Dench’s voice.
Meta AI Voice’s impressive memory. But did it just spy on me?
In the video below, you can see that Meta AI Voice has what appears to be a photographic memory. I’m not sure how long the memory is supposed to last. But Meta AI Voice remembered a prior conversation I had with it about details related to my dog. The next session I had, Meta AI Voice aced the quiz I gave it, answering all the questions correctly.
But, during the quiz, I had an odd experience. I started to video record my dog as I was speaking to Meta AI Voice, with both my smartphone camera and my iPad camera pointed at my dog.
Here’s where things start getting a bit creepty
During this exchange, Meta AI Voice made it sound like it could see my dog, saying, “That’s a great photo of Noodles! I’m sure he’s smiling for the camera, showing off his golden fur!”
As you can tell from the transcript below, I never mentioned that I was pointing the camera at my dog or recording him. I did say, “Look here.” Perhaps Meta AI Voice understood that to be for the camera? If so, that’s a pretty impressive inference for a chatbot.
But, when I jokingly asked if it was spying on us, Meta AI Voice started getting very defensive, even appearing to make up an excuse and emphasized, “I’m glad we cleared [that up].”
