Meta AI now rolling out to all Indian users
Meta began testing its AI chatbot, Meta AI, in India during elections. After initially rolling it out to select users, the chatbot is now accessible to all users across Meta platforms including WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook. Meta AI is powered by Llama-3, a recently released open-source LLM from Meta. At present, the AI chatbot only supports English. This comes a week after Google released its Gemini app for Android users in India, which supports nine local languages.
Functionality and user interaction
Meta AI's functionality is similar to other chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude. It can suggest recipes, plan workouts, assist with email drafting, or summarize large chunks of text. On Instagram, it recommends Reels based on user search queries while on Facebook it can answer questions related to posts. Meta AI is accessible through the search bar in Meta apps and through the meta.ai website. However, it does seem to be gradually rolling out to users.
Meta AI for WhatsApp users in India
Meta is introducing its chatbot to India's extensive user base, which includes 500 million WhatsApp users and hundreds of millions of users on its other apps. On WhatsApp, users can interact with Meta AI individually or within a group chat for tasks like trip planning or movie selection. The company clarified that Meta AI doesn't have context of the group's conversation, beyond the text used when mentioning or replying to the chatbot.
Image generation feature and biases
The chatbot also possesses an image generation feature based on user prompts. However, TechCrunch reported in May that Meta AI showed a tendency to add turbans when generating images of Indian men, and consistently generated images of traditional Indian houses with vibrant colors and styled roofs. While Meta acknowledged these biases and promised updates, it remains unclear if any changes have been made.
