Meta announces ChatGPT competitor that adds social feed for AI prompts
The Facebook company is sticking to its social roots with its new AI app
🤖 Meta has announced its new Meta AI app that combines ChatGPT with Threads
🗣️ The idea is to be your AI companion while also giving you a glimpse into how your friends interact with it
🥽 It replaces the View companion app for Meta Ray-Ban glasses
📱 The app is rolling out now to iOS and Android users
Meta is taking on ChatGPT and Grok with its own AI chatbot app, and it’s adding a very Facebook spin.
The company has announced Meta AI, its new app that integrates the company’s Llama models and lets you interact with a live chatbot for answering complex questions, generating content, and more. Its biggest differentiator compared to other AI chatbots is the social feed, which lets you see how your friends on Instagram and Facebook use the bot. The feature arrives well before ChatGPT’s planned social media component launches.
🗣️ Talk to Meta AI with text and voice. Using Meta AI will feel familiar to anyone who’s used ChatGPT or Google Gemini. You can talk to it via text or with your voice, and it allows you to ask questions with natural language and deliver advanced responses. Built with Llama 4, Meta AI can help you research various topics, generate images on the fly, create emails, and more.
🧠 It knows what you’re into and remembers over time. One of the big benefits of using Meta AI is the fact that it integrates across the rest of Meta’s services. The model can learn about you through your Facebook and Instagram accounts, remember certain things about you as you use it, and become more contextual to you and your personality. Meta says this experience will be available in the US and Canada at first.
🤳 See what your friends are prompting. What’s most interesting about Meta AI is the Discovery feed, which lets you see what your Facebook and Instagram followers are using the chatbot for. Meta says this feed is designed to demystify AI chatbots for users who might not know where to start with it. The sheer capabilities of these models is virtually limitless, so it’s nice that newcomers to the technology will have a better understanding of how they can use it based on what their friends are using it for.
🧪 Experiment with speech. Meta is also integrating an early version of a special voice mode that lets you have complex conversations with Meta AI. It’s currently in beta and doesn’t support web access, but it’s there if you want to give it a go. Think of it as an aternative to Gemini Live on phones like the Pixel 9a.
📲 Available across Meta apps. The Meta AI app is an extension of the AI model that’s already available in places like the Instagram search bar. That means you can have the same contextual-to-you experience with Meta AI in apps like Instagram and Facebook as you can in the standalone app. Meta designed the app as a more accessible way to use the chatbot, but it’ll remain available in other Meta services.
👋 Bye-bye, View. Meta is replacing the View companion app for its Ray-Ban smart glasses with the new Meta AI app. You’ll be able to manage your glasses the same way you could in the older application, and Meta says it’ll keep integration around as it continues to ship AI-powered hardware in the future.
📅 Available now. The Meta AI app is available starting today for iOS and Android.
Max Buondonno is an editor at The Shortcut. He’s been reporting on the latest consumer technology since 2015, with his work featured on CNN Underscored, ZDNET, How-To Geek, XDA, TheStreet, and more. Follow him on X @LegendaryScoop and Instagram @LegendaryScoop.