Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has commenced trials of its artificial intelligence chatbot, Meta AI, with selected users in India across its various platforms, including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Within Instagram, Meta AI has been integrated into the platform’s direct messaging feature, allowing users to engage with the chatbot directly. By tapping on the Meta AI icon in the search bar, individuals can interact one-on-one with the chatbot, akin to other AI assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. It serves as a versatile assistant capable of addressing a wide range of queries, including real-time information.
In addition to providing answers, the assistant also furnishes a link to Google search results pertaining to the specific query and cites the sources used to derive the answer. Its capabilities extend to generating text and images, summarizing lengthy texts, aiding in writing tasks such as proofreading and editing, translating text across languages, and crafting poems and stories, among other functions.
Users can summon the assistant within their ongoing personal and group chats on Instagram to seek advice or pose questions. For example, individuals can seek recommendations for group trips or ideas for dinner party recipes, with the chatbot offering suggestions directly within the conversation. By typing “@,” users can initiate a conversation with Meta AI.
Furthermore, Meta has initiated testing of the chatbot within WhatsApp, with several users sharing screenshots of their interactions with the bot on various social media platforms.
A spokesperson for Meta stated, “Our generative AI-powered experiences are under development in varying phases, and we’re testing a range of them publicly in a limited capacity.”
India serves as the largest market for Meta’s suite of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, boasting a combined user base of over a billion monthly users. Meta introduced Meta AI in September 2023 as part of its broader foray into generative AI, aiming to integrate these capabilities into its applications used by over 3 billion people daily.
Powered by a custom AI model leveraging technology from Meta’s open-source large language model (LLM) Llama 2, Meta AI represents the company’s strategic endeavor to establish a significant presence in the AI landscape alongside tech giants such as Google and Microsoft, as well as emerging players like OpenAI.
