Meta AI gets multilingual with support for 7 languages including Hindi

Meta AI, which was first introduced in September 2023 as part of the social networking giant's big push into generative AI, is currently available in 22 countries

Facebook parent Meta is making its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Meta AI available in seven new languages including Hindi and Hindi-Romanized Script (or Hinglish), escalating the AI chatbot race with rivals OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot.

This move comes a month after Meta rolled out its AI chatbot in India, the company's largest market with a combined subscriber base of over a billion across its apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads.

With this launch, people will be able to interact with Meta AI across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook in Hindi, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish with plans to add support for more languages in the future.

Meta AI, which was first introduced in September 2023 as part of the social networking giant's big push into generative AI, is currently available in 22 countries. This includes countries such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Cameroon where the chatbot is launching today.

"Meta AI is on track to reach our goal of becoming the most used AI assistant by the end of this year. There are hundreds of millions of people using it already and we keep making it smarter and freely available in more countries" Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a video clip on Instagram on July 23.

In addition to language support, Meta is introducing new creative tools that enable people to create AI-generated images of themselves in any place, era or style of their interest. For instance, one can type a prompt like “Imagine me in a retro video game” and take a selfie photo to generate these images.

Starting this week, Meta said it is rolling out the ability for users to create images directly within the feed, stories, comments and messages across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Meta AI's new creative editing capabilities will also allow users to easily add or remove objects in an image, change them and edit them.

For example, Meta said that users can create an image with a prompt “Imagine a cat snorkeling in a goldfish bowl” and then decide they want to replace the cat with a dog. Users can then write “Change the cat to a dog” to adjust the image.

A new Edit with AI button launching next month will also allow users to further fine tune the AI-generated image, Meta said.

New Llama 3.1 launch

This launch coincided with the social networking giant releasing Llama 3.1, the latest version of its open source large language model, three months after the release of Llama 3.

Llama 3.1 will be available in three variants: a larger model with 405 billion parameters along with updated versions of existing 8 billion and 70 billion models.

Meta stated that users will be able to access the larger Llama 405B model on Meta AI's web app and WhatsApp. The model's improved reasoning capabilities will make it possible for Meta AI to understand and answer complex questions, especially on the topics of math and coding, it said.

"You can get help on your math homework with step-by-step explanations and feedback, write code faster with debugging support and optimization suggestions, and master complex technical and scientific concepts with expert instruction," Meta said.

Meta's Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had previously stated they plan to release more models in the future that will bring in capabilities such as longer context windows, multilingual, and multi-modal, which means it can understand and work with different formats, including text, code, audio, image, and video, at the same time.