Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Meta, his social-media-turned-metaverse-turned-artificial intelligence conglomerate, will upgrade its AI assistants to give them a range of celebrity voices, including those of Dame Judi Dench and John Cena. The more important upgrade for Meta’s long-term ambitions, though, is the new ability of its models to see users’ photos and other visual information.

Meta today also announced Llama 3.2, the first version of its free AI models to have visual abilities, broadening their usefulness and relevance for robotics, virtual reality, and so-called AI agents. Some versions of Llama 3.2 are also the first to be optimized to run on mobile devices. This could help developers create AI-powered apps that run on a smartphone and tap into its camera or watch the screen in order to use apps on your behalf.

“This is our first open source, multimodal model, and it’s going to enable a lot of interesting applications that require visual understanding,” Zuckerberg said on stage at Connect, a Meta event held in California today.

Given Meta’s enormous reach with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, the assistant upgrade could give many people their first taste of a new generation of more vocal and visually capable AI helpers. Meta said today that more than 180 million people already use Meta AI, as the company’s AI assistant is called, every week.

Zuckerberg demonstrated a number of new AI features at Connect. He showed videos in which a pair of Ray Ban smart glasses running Llama 3.2 give recipe advice based on the ingredients in view, and provide commentary on clothing seen on a rack in a store. Meta’s CEO also showed off several experimental AI features that the company is working on. These include software that enables live translation between Spanish and English, automatic dubbing of videos into different languages, and an avatar for creators that can answer fan questions on their behalf.

Meta has lately given its AI a more prominent billing in its apps—for example, making it part of the search bar in Instagram and Messenger. The new celebrity voice options available to users will also include Awkwafina, Keegan Michael Key, and Kristen Bell.

Meta previously gave celebrity personas to text-based assistants, but these characters failed to gain much traction. In July the company launched a tool called AI Studio that lets users create chatbots with any persona they choose. Meta says the new voices will be made available to users in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand over the next month. The Meta AI image capabilities will be rolled out in the US, but the company did not say when the features might appear in other markets.

The new version of Meta AI will also be able to provide feedback on and information about users’ photos; for example, if you’re unsure what bird you’ve snapped a picture of, it can tell you the species. And it will be able to help edit images by, for instance, adding new backgrounds or details on demand. Google released a similar tool for its Pixel smartphones and for Google Photos in April.

Powering Meta AI’s new capabilities is an upgraded version of Llama, Meta’s premier large language model. The free model announced today may also have a broad impact, given how widely the Llama family has been adopted by developers and startups already.

In contrast to OpenAI’s models, Llama can be downloaded and run locally without charge—although there are some restrictions on large-scale commercial use. Llama can also more easily be fine-tuned, or modified with additional training, for specific tasks.

Patrick Wendell, cofounder and VP of engineering at Databricks, a company that hosts AI models including Llama, says many companies are drawn to open models because they allow them to better protect their own data.

Large language models are increasingly becoming “multimodal,” meaning they are trained to handle audio and images as input as well as text. This extends a model’s abilities and allows developers to build new kinds of AI applications on top of it, including so-called AI agents capable of carrying out useful tasks on computers on their behalf. Llama 3.2 should make it easier for developers to build AI agents that can, say, browse the web, perhaps hunting for deals on a particular type of product when given a short description.

“Multimodal models are a big deal because the data people and businesses use is not just text, it can come in many different formats, including images and audio or more specialized formats like protein sequences or financial ledgers,” says Phillip Isola, a professor at MIT. “In the last few years we’ve gone from strong language models to now having models that also work well on images and voices. Each year we are seeing more data modalities become accessible to these systems.”

“With Llama 3.1, Meta showed that open models could finally close the gap with their proprietary counterparts,” says Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of Air Street Capital, and the author of an influential yearly report on AI. Benaich adds that multimodal models tend to out-perform larger text-only ones. “I’m excited to see how 3.2 shapes up,” he says.

Earlier today, the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), a research institute in Seattle, released an advanced open source multimodal model called Molmo. Molmo was released under a less restrictive license than Llama, and Ai2 is also releasing details of its training data, which can help researchers and developers experiment with and modify the model.

Meta said today that it would release several sizes of Llama 3.2 with corresponding capabilities. Besides two more powerful instantiations with 11 billion and 90 billion parameters—a measure of a model’s complexity as well as its size—Meta is releasing less capable 1 billion and 3 billion parameter versions designed to work well on portable devices. Meta says these versions have been optimized for ARM-based mobile chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek.

Meta’s AI overhaul comes at a heady time, with tech giants racing to offer the most advanced AI. The company’s decision to release its most prized models for free may give it an edge in providing the foundation for many AI tools and services—especially as companies begin to explore the potential of AI agents.