Meta has made its Llama-3-powered AI chatbot available to all users in India, following a few months of testing. The chatbot is currently only available in English and not in any local languages. The testing of Meta AI began in April across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook, and was rolled out in over a dozen countries, but not in India at the time due to the general elections.
The chatbot can be accessed through the search bar in Meta’s apps and is also available on the meta.ai website. Its functionality is similar to other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, allowing users to ask questions, get recipe suggestions, plan workouts, and more.
On Instagram, the chatbot can suggest Reels to watch based on search queries, while on Facebook, it will prompt users to ask questions related to a post. Meta AI can also generate images based on prompts, but there have been concerns raised about biases in its image generation capabilities.
The chatbot is being introduced to India’s massive user base of 500 million WhatsApp users, as well as hundreds of millions of users of Meta’s other apps. On WhatsApp, users can chat with the chatbot individually or within a group chat for planning purposes. However, the company has stated that the chatbot does not have the context of the group’s conversation beyond the text used when mentioning or replying to the chatbot.
Meta has fine-tuned its model based on user conversations with the chatbot and it is not possible to turn off or hide the chatbot’s functionality in its apps, although users can choose to engage in a search without invoking the chatbot.
