Meta AI made its debut in India last week when some users spotted a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot appearing on the WhatsApp app. Now, Meta AI is also starting to appear among some Instagram and Messenger users in the country. The chat assistant powered by Llama is a versatile chatbot capable of conducting natural language conversations, answering questions, generating images, writing papers, and more. The Meta AI chatbot can be found in the search bar of Instagram DMs as a pink-blue ring.

Access to the AI-powered chatbot appears to be restricted, with multiple users reporting not seeing the feature. Meta Spokesperson comfirmed TechCrunch said the company is testing the new feature in parts of India and Africa. “Our generative AI experiences are in various stages of development, and we are publicly testing a range of them in a limited capacity,” the statement read.

With this initiative, India now has access to all major AI chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity AI search engine, and Meta AI. The social media giant launched the chatbot in September 2023, but its availability was limited to the United States and a few other regions. Before this, the AI ​​assistant was not accessible in India.

Since Meta AI is a generalist chatbot, it can perform a wide range of tasks. In addition, it can generate images, a feature that makes it currently the second publicly available chatbot after Copilot (Google has limited Gemini’s ability to generate images). Meta AI focuses on text-only capabilities and can answer questions, generate text, translate text, summarize large chunks of text, write papers, analyze data, perform mathematical calculations, and even assist with coding-related tasks. The AI ​​chatbot connects to the internet via Bing, so it can provide real-time information as well.

Meta AI can also generate images powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E. To generate an image, you need to enter a forward slash and enter “Imagine” followed by the desired prompt. For example, you could write “/Imagine a sunflower garden with children playing around it.” However, please note that the chatbot cannot fulfill any requests for images of real-life people. In addition, all Meta-generated images will have an “Imagined with Meta” watermark to distinguish them from real images.

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