After a few months of testing during the general elections, Meta is making its AI 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 on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook in April, rolling it out to select users. Days later, the company officially launched 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 through the search bar in its apps, Meta is also making the tool available through after 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, schedule workouts, help you write emails, or summarize a bunch of text.
On Instagram, the chatbot can recommend Reels to follow based on your search query. Additionally, in your 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 northern lights, you could ask Meta AI for suggestions about the best places and times to see the northern lights.
Meta AI can also generate images based on your prompts. TechCrunch found in May that Meta AI has a strong tendency to add turbans when generating images of Indian men. There were also other preconceptions, such as the constant creation of an old Indian house with vibrant colors, wooden columns and stylized roofs.
While Meta said it was, at the time, constantly upgrading its models, it’s unclear if the company had made any changes in those areas.
“This is a new technology and it may not always return the response we intend, which is the same for all AI systems that are created. Since launch, we’ve been constantly releasing updates and improvements to our models and continue to work to make them better,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch 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. On WhatsApp, while you can chat with Meta AI individually, you can also use the chatbot’s help in a group chat with things like planning a trip or deciding on a movie to watch.
The company said Meta AI doesn’t have the context of the group chat beyond the text you use when you mention or respond to the chatbot. The company has improved its model based on your conversations with it.
Meta said it is not possible to disable or hide the Meta AI feature in its app. However, people can choose to participate in a search without invoking the chatbot.
The social networking company’s launch comes a week after Google launched its Gemini app for Android users in India with support for nine local languages.
