Facebook-owner Meta is working on artificial intelligence research to generate worlds through speech to improve how people chat to voice assistants and translate between languages, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, as he sketched out key steps to building the metaverse.

Zuckerberg is betting that the metaverse, a futuristic idea of virtual environments where users can work, socialize and play, will be the successor to the mobile internet.

"The key to unlocking a lot of these advances is AI," he said, speaking at the company's live-streamed "Inside the Lab" event.