Meta AI has just been introduced in India where some of its users got their first glimpse of it. The generative artificial intelligence chatbot is now available on Instagram and Messenger for select users in the country. Equipped with Llama technology, the chat assistant can engage in natural language dialogues, respond to queries, create images, write essays, and perform several other functions. Users can locate the Meta AI chatbot in the Instagram DM search bar, identified by its distinctive blue ring with pink accents.
Currently, access to this AI-powered chatbot is limited, with many users reporting the feature’s absence. A spokesperson from Meta confirmed the ongoing tests of this feature in India and parts of Africa, stating, “Our generative AI-powered experiences are under development in varying phases, and we’re testing a range of them publicly in a limited capacity.”
This expansion means that India now hosts all the major AI chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity AI’s search engine, and now Meta AI. The social media company initially launched the chatbot in September 2023, but it was restricted to the US and select other regions until now.
The capabilities of Meta AI are extensive. As a generalist chatbot, it handles a variety of tasks and is one of the few publicly available bots, alongside Copilot, that can also generate images (Google has limited Gemini’s image-generation capabilities). The chatbot can answer inquiries, generate and translate text, summarize extensive texts, craft essays, analyze data, perform mathematical operations, and aid in coding tasks. It is connected to the internet via Bing, enabling it to provide up-to-date information.
Meta AI’s image generation function is powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E. To request an image, users should type “/imagine” followed by the prompt they wish to visualize, like “/imagine a sunflower garden and kids playing around it.” However, the chatbot does not process image requests involving real-life personalities, and all Meta-generated images bear the “Imagined with Meta” watermark to differentiate them from actual photographs.
