Meta AI's latest feature can show you in a fantasy world – if you feed it your face

(Image credit: Meta)

Meta is opening up access to the Meta AI assistant geographically, linguistically, and artistically, giving it the ability to communicate in seven new languages and seven additional countries, and create fantasy images of you based on prompts.

Users in 22 countries can now interact with Meta AI on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook, and the chatbot now understands and can respond in French, German, Hindi, Hindi-Romanized Script, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Meta AI will also appear for the first time to those wearing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Meta Quest headsets.

The expansion also includes a new AI image creation tool called “Imagine Me” that will produce a digital avatar of the user based on uploaded photos. The virtual version of the user can then be embedded in any setting desired through a text prompt. If you don’t like what the AI comes up with, you can submit a follow-up prompt that will change whatever aspect doesn’t match your vision for the AI-generated art.

“Simply type “Imagine me” in your Meta AI chat to get started, and then you can add a prompt like “Imagine me as royalty” or “Imagine me in a surrealist painting.” From there, you can share the images with friends and family, giving you the perfect response or funny sidebar to entertain your group chat,” Meta explained in the update announcement. “You can easily add or remove objects, change them and edit them — adjusting just what you want while keeping the rest of the image as it was. You could say “Imagine a cat snorkeling in a goldfish bowl” and then decide you want it to be a corgi. So you’d simply write “Change the cat to a corgi” to adjust the image.“

Meta AI Imagine Me — (Image credit: Meta)

Imagine Me-ta

Meta had been testing the Imagine Me feature on WhatsApp, but it will now roll out across all of the tech giant’s platforms. In addition, any AI art produced with Meta’s tools will soon be sharable on Facebook posts and stories, as well as through messages on Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. One upgrade that won’t be universally available right now is access to Meta’s most advanced AI model, Llama 405B, which will enhance the assistant’s ability to tackle complex questions, particularly in math and coding, but only on WhatsApp and meta.ai for now.

Still, it’s the Imagine Me and related AI image editing tools that are the standout aspect of the upgrade. It’s not something Meta’s rivals are offering right now, instantly opening a channel to entice some OpenAI and Google fans to switch to Meta. Frankly, ChatGPT and Google Gemini will rarely create AI images of real people and definitely won’t store a model to reuse. They tend to suggest a general look for an AI-generated image of a human if they even allow it all.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.