Meta has decided to bring Meta AI to Europe after all. Starting this week, the social media giant’s AI chatbot will be available in 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories.
Meta AI will support six different European languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
It can help users brainstorm, plan a trip, or answer questions based on information found on the internet. Users can activate the chatbot by pressing a new blue icon that’s been added to Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
According to Meta, Meta AI can only read messages shared with the chatbot. All other personal messages remain end-to-end encrypted. The chatbot will appear on the screen when you type “@Meta AI” in a group conversation on WhatsApp. For now, this feature will only be available on WhatsApp. Meta intends to bring it to Messenger and Instagram as well very soon.
For the time being, the AI chatbot will be limited to text-based chat features for European users across the aforementioned apps. Other functionalities like generating and editing photos and asking questions about images may roll out on a later date.
Meta AI was launched in the United States in September 2023. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp also intended to bring it to Europe. However, it was paused in the region when the Data Protection Commission (DPC), Ireland’s data protection authority, said it was worried that the AI chatbot would violate European users’ privacy.
“This launch follows almost a year of intensive engagement with various European regulators, and for now, we are only offering a text-only model in the region which wasn’t trained on first-party data from users in the EU,” Meta spokesperson Ellie Heatrick tells The Verge.
She continues by saying that Meta will continue to work with regulators so European users can access other AI innovations in the future.
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