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 testing Meta AI in India on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook in April by rolling it out to select users. Days later, the company officially rolled out the bot in more than a dozen countries, but not in India, likely due to the general elections being held in the country at the time.
In addition to making the chatbot available to all users via the search bar in its apps, Meta also makes the tool available via the meta.ai website.
Meta AI's functionality is similar to that of other chatbots such as ChatGPT from OpenAI, Gemini from Google and Claude from Anthropic. You can ask him to suggest recipes, plan workouts, help you write emails or summarize a piece of text.
On Instagram, the chatbot can suggest Reels to watch based on your search query. Additionally, you will see a Meta AI prompt on the Facebook feed so you can ask questions about the post. For example, if you see a photo of the Northern Lights, you can ask Meta AI for suggestions on the best places and times to see the Northern Lights.
Meta AI can also generate images based on your prompts. JS discovered in May that Meta AI has a strong tendency to include turbans when generating images of Indian men. There were also other prejudices, such as consistently generating an old-fashioned Indian house with vibrant colors, wooden columns and stylized roofs.
While Meta said it was constantly updating its models at the time, it's not clear if the company made any changes in these areas.
“This is a new technology, and it may not always produce the response we intended, which is the same for all generative AI systems. Since launch, we have continuously released updates and improvements to our models, and we continue to work on improving them,” a spokesperson told JS at the time.
Meta is bringing its chatbot to India's massive user base of 500 million WhatsApp users, along with hundreds of millions of users of its other apps. While you can chat with Meta AI individually on WhatsApp, within a group chat you can also enlist the chatbot's help with things like planning a trip or deciding which movie to watch.
The company said Meta AI doesn't have the context of the group conversation beyond the text you use when you mention or reply to the chatbot. The company has refined its model based on your conversations with it.
Meta said it is not possible to disable or hide Meta AI functionality in its app. However, people can choose to perform a search without invoking the chatbot.
The social media company's rollout comes a week after Google released its Gemini app for Android users in India with support for nine local languages.
