WhatsApp, alongside Instagram and Facebook Messenger, has introduced a new feature known as Meta AI. The company is currently rolling out this feature in select countries to enhance conversations on social messaging platforms. Meta AI can respond to queries and generate text and image results based on prompts. Here’s everything you need to know about Meta AI, including its availability, use cases, limitations, and more.
Table of Contents
What is Meta AI
Meta AI is the new generative AI (artificial intelligence) assistant developed by Meta. It is the ChatGPT rival and is present within Meta apps like WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger as a tool to enhance user interactions and experiences. As an AI chatbot, it can respond to your messages/prompts and interact as if you are having a conversation.
Meta AI availability
- Platforms: It is available on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and the web (Meta.AI).
- Countries: It is rolled out in English in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Meta will bring it to more countries and languages soon. The company has announced Meta AI for India and the rollout appears to be taking place gradually.
Meta AI uses
- Answer queries: Type @MetaAI in a WhatsApp chat or Instagram message window and shoot your queries to the bot. You can also open the Meta AI chat window and ask it directly. It will answer you.
- Search the web: Meta AI responses can include links from both Google Search and Bing. So, it searches and sifts through to give you the relevant results.
- Conversation: You can have regular chats with the AI. There are over 28 characters based on real-world celebrities like Charli D’Amelio, Kendall Jenner, MrBeast, etc.
- Generate text and images: It can dish out a long piece of text content and “photorealistic” images. You can get it to create brand logos and images for social media posts.
- Get content recommendations: You can ask Meta AI to give you a particular type of content you want from their vast library of user-generated content. For example: You can ask Meta AI for a travel video Reel.
- Miscellaneous: It can also provide translations, summarization, sentiment analysis, easy explanations, data analysis, code generation, etc.
How Meta AI works
Meta AI uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other machine learning algorithms to understand your prompts/queries and generate relevant responses. It is trained on and relies on Meta’s Llama 3 Large Language Model (LLM) for the following actions:
- It first analyses your prompts/queries to understand the meaning and context.
- It then refers to its knowledge (based on LLM) and comes up with an answer.
- It gives you the answer.
- It reads and learns from your feedback to improve over time.
You can learn how to use Meta AI on WhatsApp and Instagram on various platforms here.
Meta AI limitations
- Meta AI doesn’t respond to political prompts during election time.
- It fails to identify the context of some queries. In one instance, it identified a sports query as a political one and refused to answer. Upon clarifying the query’s intent, it gave the response.
- It works only in English for now.
- Like other AI models, this one also suffers from bias, hallucinations, common sense, logical reasoning, creativity, and ethical consideration.
- Llama 3 consists of information till March 2023 only. However, since it can rely on Google and Bing, it can source the information from the web. So, this isn’t entirely a limitation.
FAQs
Can I disable Meta AI on WhatsApp or Instagram?
Unfortunately, there is no way to turn off Meta AI on WhatsApp or Instagram.
Is Meta AI available in India?
Meta has announced that Meta AI is rolling out in India. It appears to be a phased rollout. So, you should get it eventually in WhatsApp, Instagram and other Meta apps.
