Facebook owner Meta prepared on Wednesday to kick off its annual Connect conference at its California headquarters, where it is expected to preview its first augmented reality glasses and announce updates to its existing virtual reality and artificial intelligence products.

Among those AI updates is an audio upgrade offering users the option to select a voice for Meta's ChatGPT-like chatbot, including the ability to make it sound like celebrities including Judi Dench and John Cena, Reuters reported on Monday.

The augmented reality reveal is a long time in the making for Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who positioned AR technology as a sort of magnum opus when he first pivoted the world’s biggest social media company toward building immersive “metaverse” systems in 2021.

However, Meta has struggled to overcome technical challenges with its AR project since then, prompting the head of the company’s metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division to acknowledge last year that a product it could viably bring to market was “still a few years away - a few, to put it lightly."

The company has been plowing tens of billions of dollars into its investments in artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other metaverse technologies, driving up its capital expense forecast for 2024 to a record high of between $37 billion and $40 billion.

Its metaverse unit Reality Labs lost $8.3 billion in the first half of this year, according to the most recent disclosures. It lost $16 billion last year.

The social media giant is planning for the first generation of the AR glasses this year to be distributed only internally and to a select group of developers, with each device costing tens of thousands of dollars to produce, according to a source familiar with the project.

Meta aims to ship its first commercial AR glasses to consumers in 2027, by which point technical breakthroughs should bring down the cost of production, the source said.

The source spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss company plans.

Zuckerberg appeared to confirm that approach, describing the AR work and telling an audience at a live taping of the Acquired podcast in San Francisco that Meta was “pretty close to being able to show off the first prototype that we have of that.”

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the plans.

In the meantime, Meta has leaned into an unexpected interim success on the road to AR with its camera-equipped Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

Riding a wave of excitement around emerging generative AI technology, the company announced at last year’s Connect conference that it was adding an AI-powered digital assistant to the glasses, turning a once-forgotten device into the most popular AI wearable on the market.

Although Meta has not disclosed sales numbers for the smart glasses, the CEO of Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica said this summer that more of the new generation sold in a few months than the old ones did in two years. Market research firm IDC estimates that more than 700,000 pairs of the glasses have shipped since the update last year.

Meta recently extended its partnership with EssilorLuxottica and contemplated a possible investment in the eyewear company, prompting speculation that the AR glasses may also bear the Ray-Ban name. More immediately, Meta’s roadmap for the smart glasses includes plans for a next generation that will feature a viewfinder capable of displaying basic text and images through the lenses.

It has been shipping software updates this year enhancing the AI assistant’s capabilities on the existing glasses, including an update in April that enabled the agent to identify and converse about objects seen by the wearer.

  - Reuters