After a few months of testing during the general elections, Meta is making its Llama-3-powered AI chatbot available to all users in India. However, Meta AI currently only supports English and no other local languages.
The company started rolling out MetaAI in April to select users on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook in India. A few days later, the company officially rolled out the bot in more than a dozen countries, but not in India, due to general elections in the country at the time.
In addition to making the chatbot available to all users through the search bar in its apps, Meta is also making the tool available through the meta.ai website.
Meta AI's functionality is similar to other chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude. You can ask it to recommend recipes, plan a workout, help you write emails, or summarize a bunch of text.
In Instagram, a chatbot can suggest Reels to watch based on your search query. Additionally, on the Facebook feed, you'll see a meta AI prompt, so you can ask questions about the post. For example, if you see a photo of the aurora borealis, you can ask Meta AI for suggestions on the best places and best times to see the northern lights.
Meta AI can also create images based on your gestures. TechCrunch found in May that Meta AI had a strong tendency to associate turbans when creating images of Indian men. There were other biases too such as consistently building an old-school Indian house with vibrant colors, wooden columns and stylized roofs.
While Meta said that, at the time, it was constantly updating its models, it's unclear if the company has made any changes in these areas.
“This is a new technology, and it may not always return the response we want, which is the same for all creative AI systems. Since we launched, we've made constant updates to our models and have released improvements, and we continue to work to improve them,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time.
Meta is bringing its chatbot to India's 500 million WhatsApp users, along with hundreds of millions of users of its other apps. On WhatsApp, while you can chat with Meta AI individually, you can also enlist the chatbot's help in group chats like planning a trip or deciding on a movie to watch.
The company said that the context of group conversations in MetaAI doesn't go beyond the text you use when you mention or reply to the chatbot. The company fine-tuned its model based on your interactions with it.
Meta said it is not possible to turn off or hide MetaAI functionality in its app. However, people can choose to engage in search without using a chatbot.
The social media company's rollout comes a week after Google released the Gemini app for Android users in India with support for nine local languages.