Meta has announced the expansion of its AI service to seven Sub-Saharan African countries, including Nigeria and Ghana.
Meta is the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
According to the company, other countries where the Meta AI service has rolled out include: South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi.
Meta said the rollout of the AI assistant in English will enhance connections and provide millions of Africans with tools to be more creative, expressive, and productive.
- “Meta AI can be used on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger to get things done, learn, create, and connect with the things that matter.
- “You can use Meta AI in feeds, chats, searches, and more across our apps to get things done and access real-time information without leaving the app you’re using,” the company said in a statement released on Thursday.
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What Mark Zuckerberg is saying
Commenting on the company’s AI feats, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in a post on his Facebook page, said Meta’s goal is to build the world’s leading AI. According to him, the company believes that Meta AI is now “the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.”
To make Meta AI even smarter, Zuckerberg said the company has also integrated real-time knowledge from Google and Bing into the answers, making it much easier to use across its apps.
- “With our expansion of Meta AI in English to new countries, we are excited to share our next-generation assistant with even more people and make it work for you by providing real-time information through our seamless search integration in the apps you know and love.
- “We’re upgrading Meta AI with our new state-of-the-art Llama 3 AI model, which we’re open-sourcing.
- “We also built some unique creation features, like the ability to animate photos. Meta AI generates high-quality images so fast that it creates and updates them in real time as you’re typing. It’ll also generate a playback video of your creation process,” Zuckerberg said.
The new features of Meta AI include the ability to animate images, iterate on them in a new style, or even turn them into a GIF to share with friends, sparking creativity in new ways. Meta first announced this form of connecting with others at the 2023 Meta Connect. Now, more people around the world can interact with it in more ways than ever before.