After months of testing during the general elections, Meta is making its AI-powered chatbot powered by Llama-3 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 in April, making it available to select users on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook. Days later, the company officially launched the robot in more than a dozen countries, but not in India, presumably because of general elections there.
Besides making the chatbot available to all users through the search bar in its app, Meta also makes the tool available through 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 suggest recipes, plan exercises, help you write emails, or summarize a series of texts.
On Instagram, a chatbot can suggest reels to watch based on your search query. Additionally, you’ll see a Meta AI prompt on your Facebook feed so you can ask questions about the post. For example, if you see an image 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. TechCrunch noted in May that Meta AI had a strong bias towards adding turbans when creating images of Indian men. There were other superstitions, too, such as building an old-style Indian house with bright colors, wooden columns, and thatched roofs.
Although Meta said at the time that it is constantly updating its models, it is not clear if the company has made any changes in this regard.
“This is a new technology that may not always respond as we intended, which is the same for all generative AI systems. Since our launch, we’ve continuously released updates and improvements to our models and will continue to work to improve them,” a TechCrunch spokesperson said at the time.
Meta has brought its chatbot to India’s massive user base of 500 million WhatsApp users, as well as several million users of its other apps. While you can chat individually with Meta AI on WhatsApp, you can also get help from a chatbot in a group chat, for example, when planning a trip or deciding which movie to watch.
The Meta AI chatbot has no group conversation context beyond the text it uses when mentioning or responding, the company said. The company has adjusted its model based on your conversations with them.
Meta says it is not possible to disable or hide Meta AI functionality in its apps. However, it is possible to participate in the study without accessing the chatbot.
The social media company’s launch comes a week after it launched the Gemini app for Android users in India with support in nine local languages.
