(Bloomberg) -- Meta Platforms Inc. is expanding its AI-powered chatbot to 21 new locations, including the UK and Brazil, where the social media giant has significant numbers of users, the company announced Wednesday.
Meta AI, the company’s chatbot, lets users converse and get recommendations on its Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger apps. It’s also available as a voice assistant in the social media giant’s smart glasses and mixed reality headsets. Almost 500 million people use Meta AI each month, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said last month.
Meta AI will be available beginning Wednesday in the UK, Brazil and additional countries in Latin America and Asia, the company announced in a statement. Along with the expansion, the chatbot will also add support for new languages, including Tagalog on Wednesday and Arabic and Thai in the near future. Eventually, Meta AI will be available in 43 countries and a dozen languages, the company said.
Zuckerberg has focused the company since last year on adding artificial intelligence to its products, a strategy that is credited for some recent user growth and advertising success. The emphasis on AI, which requires spending huge amounts of money in computing power, is a pivot away from the company’s earlier attention on the metaverse, a virtual world for work and play. The shift has appealed to investors, who have driven the shares up 67% this year compared with a 20% jump in the S&P 500.
Meta earlier this year had also planned to launch its AI chatbot in the EU, before facing regulatory pushback. The company’s large language model, called Llama, is trained in part using public posts on Facebook and Instagram. In June, Meta announced plans to start training Llama on posts from European users, but just days later said it would pause those plans indefinitely after the Irish Data Protection Commission pushed back on its decision. At the time Meta said it still planned to bring the product to Europe, but declined to share a timeline.
A Meta spokesperson said the company didn’t have anything further to share about its plans to expand the chatbot to the EU.
Meta’s products have faced regulatory challenges in the EU over the company’s handling of personal data. In July, the EU warned Meta that it risked fines for making Europeans pay to block their data on Instagram and Facebook from being used for ads. Last week, the EU’s Court of Justice ordered Meta to stop using data related to a person’s sexuality for ad targeting.
Along with the expansion of Meta AI across its apps, the chatbot will also be available on the Ray-Ban Meta glasses in the UK and Australia.
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