WhatsApp rolls out Artificial Intelligence (AI) in South Africa

Meta Platforms has begun rolling out its built-in artificial intelligence (AI) assistance in South Africa.

Tech enthusiast Grant Hinds breaks down the nitty gritty on Drive with Thando (947). 

Listen to the discussion below.

Meta AI first became available to select users in September last year before gradually expanding across the world.

Meta says the tool is aimed at helping users access Generative AI to enable them to be more creative, productive and entertained. 

Its core capability is responding to users’ questions about a variety of topics, similar to a search engine. 

It can generate images of ideas, places, or people from text prompts. 

To use this feature, type in the prompt ‘/image’ followed by an explanation of what you want to see. 

“It’s a very exciting tool because you can do a lot of things like imagine images… so not only can it come up with your Instagram captions, it can also generate images.”

- Grant Hinds, tech enthusiast

Images are watermarked so that users can identify that it is AI-generated.

Hinds says this will be game-changing for many people as WhatsApp may be their only gateway to this technology.

“You can use WhatsApp on a pretty low-end device and all of this processing is happening in the cloud and on their servers… it doesn’t mean you need a high-end device to access this.”

- Grant Hinds, tech enthusiast

Scroll up to the audio player to listen to the interview.