Meta’s AI chatbot now available for users in UK, Brazil, but not EU due to “unpredictable” regulatory environment
Meta Platforms looks to expand the reach of its AI chatbot, after announcing it is now available in six more markets.
Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday on his WhatsApp channel, that “Meta AI is live in more languages and countries starting today. Happy to bring the leading AI to Brazil, UK, Philippines, and more.”
Meta had announced the ChatGPT-like tool at its annual Connect conference in September 2023. Meta’s AI assistant can handle audio, images, and text, and also came with a feature that allowed users to chat with bots that used a celebrity’s image and imitated elements of their personalities.
Last week Meta revealed it had built a new AI model called Movie Gen that can generate video from user prompts as well as editing existing videos – for instance adding pom-poms into the hands of a man running in the desert.
New markets
Until now however, Meta AI had only been available in the United States and Australia.
But now Meta AI is available for users in the UK, Brazil, the Philippines, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay.
Users located in those countries can now use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger apps, and the Meta.ai website to access the chatbot.
Access to the Meta AI chatbot can also be achieved if a pair of £299 Ray-Ban Meta frames is purchased.
With the expansion into the UK and Brazil (plus other countries), Zuckerberg is hoping to increase both its reach into new markets and grow its user base.
During last month’s Meta Connect event, Mark Zuckerberg had stated that Meta AI now had nearly 500 million users across the world, and that the chatbot was on track to become the most used assistant in the world by the end of the year.
Some media outlets have reported that Meta plans to release Meta AI in more countries including Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and Yemen.
Not Europe
However a key market where Meta AI will remain unavailable for the time being is the European Union.
In June Meta said it would delay the launch of its AI tools in Europe after users and a privacy group complained about its plans to use extensive public user data to train the AI models without first obtaining user consent.
Then in July Meta said it would withhold its multimodal Llama AI model (that underpins Meta AI) from the European Union, “due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment.”
Image credit Meta Platforms
Celebrity voices
Previous media reports have stated that most Meta AI chatbot daily users access the app through WhatsApp, followed by Facebook, with few Instagram users.
Meta of course is competing with ChatGPT from Microsoft-backed OpenAI as well as other AI tools including Grok from Elon Musk start-up xAI.
In May OpenAI launched an AI model called GPT-4o with voice capabilities, but pulled one of the voices, called Sky, after Scarlett Johansson said the voice was “eerily similar” to hers, even though she had declined to work with the company on such a feature.
Last month, Meta added features like new celebrity voices from the likes of Judi Dench and John Cena, as well lip-synced translations to Meta AI.
