Meta AI is an AI-powered virtual assistant that’s accessible across several Meta apps and platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. It’s even integrated into the Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
More than just a chatbot, Meta AI is designed to enhance your social media experience with personalized recommendations, powerful automations and generative AI tools that help you create content.
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What is Meta AI?Launched in October 2024, Meta AI is Meta’s answer to the growing legion of chatbots and tools powered by artificial intelligence. Meta pitches it as a way to “learn, create and connect in new ways”.
Rather than a standalone assistant, Meta AI is integrated directly into the user interface of several Meta apps, including Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. It’s designed to complement the experience on those platforms by offering automation and personalization in the context of what you’re doing.
Like rival chatbots Gemini and ChatGPT, Meta AI is built on a large language model. Trained on terabytes of data, it can hold real-time conversations and respond to requests written in natural language. There are several versions of Meta’s open-source Lama 3.2 model, including multimodal variants which can process images.
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By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.What can you use Meta AI for?At its core, Meta AI is a conversational chatbot that can answer queries. Whether it pops up in Messenger or WhatsApp, you can ask it about everything from recipes and exercise routines to coding, movie recommendations and essay plans. Voice support means you can hold a spoken conversation, too, with the option to choose a celebrity voice for the assistant.
Because it draws on the data that you share across all Meta apps, as well as details that you write in your chats, it’s able to personalize its responses to your queries. If Meta AI learns that you’re vegetarian, for example, its recipe suggestions will reflect that.
Meta AI is also a creative tool. Like the best AI image generators, you can ask it to create and animate visuals based on text prompts. Editing powers let you add and remove things from existing images, as well as changing backgrounds. Plus it can identify details in photos that you take.
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Outside of the chat interface, in-context assistance augments how you use Meta’s apps. You might see prompt suggestions beneath a content link on Facebook, for example. You can access it within group chats and also use it to help you write image captions.
Then there’s AI Studio, where you can chat with virtual characters based on your interests, including AI versions of your forite creators.
While it’s a multi-faceted tool, Meta AI is tightly woven into Meta’s family of apps. Although Meta is working on a standalone app, Meta AI is fundamentally designed to augment platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for existing users. It isn’t yet an independent AI assistant.
That’s reflected in the capabilities of its tools. While it can generate images, for example, Meta AI doesn’t offer the same depth of control as a dedicated AI image generator like Adobe Firefly. Equally, while it can offer useful summary information, it doesn’t he the deep research skills of ChatGPT or Gemini.
How much does Meta AI cost?Meta AI is currently free for anyone to use.
Its Llama 3 large language models are also open-source, which means anyone can download and adapt them for different uses.
Where can you use Meta AI?Meta AI can be accessed through Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. You’ll find the chatbot ailable wherever there’s a chat interface. Its contextual integrations will appear in different places depending on the platform that you’re using.
Meta AI is also ailable on the web at meta.ai. You can use it as a guest, but full functionality – including conversation history and image generation – requires you to sign in with your Instagram or Facebook account. Meta is reportedly working on a standalone smartphone app.
Meta AI is also integrated into Meta Quest and the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, where it works as a voice-controlled assistant which can be prompted with images from the built-in cameras.
Meta AI is currently ailable to users in 22 countries, including the US, Canada, Australia and the UK, with support for more regions coming soon. Meta AI isn’t ailable in the EU at present.
Is Meta AI any good?We hen’t fully tested Meta AI, but our first experience with it was a positive one. We found it able to understand and follow the context of spoken queries, even when we interrupted it. It wasn’t entirely glitch-free, though.
More recently, we tested Meta AI with Ray-Ban’s Meta glasses and found it inconsistent but powerful when it worked. Its level of comprehension was “impressively human-like”.
Other reviews online he been less effusive. CNET welcomed the convenience of its integration with Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger, but noted that Meta AI was prone to hallucinations and often required follow-up prompts in conversations.
TechCrunch found its search summaries limited in their depth and sources, with straightforward responses that didn’t seem to curate information from results.
Meta AI is an evolving work in progress. Like most AI assistants, its responses need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Use Meta AI if...You want AI to supercharge your social media
Meta AI can give you assistance with just about anything, from right within your forite Meta apps. If you already live on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, it’s a clever way to enhance your user experience.
You’re a keen content creator
From caption prompts to automated image edits, Meta AI is designed to make it easier to create engaging content. Because its baked right in to Instagram and Facebook, it’s an ideal AI tool for influencers.
You want a standalone AI assistant
Meta is working on a standalone app for Meta AI. For now, you need to use one of Meta’s social apps to access the AI assistant, where its deeply tied in to the social ecosystem.
You don’t want an AI trained on your data
Full access to Meta AI requires you to sign in with an Instagram or Facebook account. Sign in and the assistant will draw on your data to personalize results, including the content of your chats.
Also considerGemini is Google’s AI-powered chatbot. Accessible on the web and via apps for iOS and Android smartphones, it’s a powerful tool that can assist with a range of text and image queries. Although it can integrate with Google’s cloud services, it’s more of a standalone tool than Meta AI.ChatGPT is the most popular AI chatbot. Like Meta AI, it can respond to complex text prompts and generate images. You can access it via web, desktop and smartphone apps, with free and paid plans. It can connect to the internet for real-time results, but there’s no social element.You might also like...The 5 top automated artificial intelligence toolsHow to opt out of Meta AIMeta wants to fill your social media feeds with bots