Meta rolls out Meta AI in India, will take on ChatGPT and Google Gemini

Tool launching today; it will be available on all social media platforms of the company to assist people in their daily lives

Has it happened that you are chatting with a friend and decided to go for a weekend trip but had to pause and use a search engine to fix the itinerary? It would have been superfast if within that chat there was an app giving recommendations.

This will be possible from Monday when Meta rolls out its Meta AI assistant across all its platforms – Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and meta.ai (a website) – in India.

Meta AI, which competes with ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, will be available in English in India for now. Users can use it to learn, create and connect with the things that matter to them, said the company.

The company announced Meta AI at last year’s Connect event, and since April it has been bringing new versions. Meta AI is available in the United States, Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Meta AI will be consumer focused in its new launch. Meta has made several AI tools for its social media platforms but with this launch all users of its platforms will get direct access to the power of AI. So WhatsApp or Instagram users need not download a separate app to access Meta AI.

Gemini in India is accessible by downloading an app.

Going back to the two friends chatting about a weekend getaway, they just have to just write ‘@MetaAI’ and options would become part of that chat. Meta said the search options are brought to users by using Google search or Microsoft’s Bing. On other Meta apps, there will be a blue hollow circle, which one needs to tap to start chatting with Meta AI.

Meta AI will have image generation on all its platforms. When interacting with Meta AI if one uses the terms ‘imagine’ one can create and share images.

Meta has been testing the tool in India for some time and company executives said that the response is positive.

“Meta AI is designed to assist you and improve your day-to-day life. We see inside India that people are looking for information gathering use cases. The biggest use cases we have seen from our tests are things like asking factual questions, getting instructional helpful advice and tutoring and learning support,” said Ryan Cairns, VP engineer lead for Gen AI at Meta, in a select virtual media briefing.

When asked if this will clash with some other platforms introducing their own AI, such as Apple and Google, Cairns said that Meta AI has its own standing. “Meta AI is available in all our apps, regardless of platforms. You can access it on WhatsApp whether you are on iOS or Android. Right now our apps provide both the biggest distribution and the most availability to the end user. And that is something that doesn’t exist when you look from the OS perspective. Google Assistant works really well on Android, Siri works really well on Apple devices. In our apps, it spans all of these places, and we think that actually an opportunity to do a better job,” said Cairns.

Cairns said that protection against misinformation is an important aspect of Meta AI. “We update our models every two weeks. We constantly are taking into account feedback from users, whether it’s from seeing things like hallucinations, which are inherent in all AI systems. We use this data to train and adapt our models to what we are seeing…,” he said. The details of Meta AI’s rollout in other Indian languages are still not clear.