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Investing.com -- Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) has introduced a standalone Meta AI app, marking its most direct push yet into the competitive consumer artificial intelligence assistant market. The new app positions itself alongside established players with AI assistant apps such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, X Corp’s Grok, and Chinese firm High-Flyer’s DeepSeek.
Integrated with Meta’s updated Llama 4 model, the Meta AI app expands voice capabilities and allows users to interact with the assistant across platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The company says the app is personalized, context-aware, and able to remember user preferences to deliver more relevant responses.
With the app, users in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand can experiment with voice interactions powered by full-duplex speech technology, allowing for more natural conversations. Meta notes that the voice model operates independently of real-time internet access and may occasionally display inconsistent behavior as development continues.
The launch comes at a time when major industry leaders, including Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), Google, Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Meta, are pledging massive capital expenditures to take the lead in artificial intelligence. According to its current outlook, Meta plans to spend $65 billion on AI and AI infrastructure in 2025.
Meta AI is also being integrated more deeply into the company’s hardware efforts. The Meta AI app will replace the Meta View companion app for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, enabling voice conversations that sync across devices, including the web. Users can start chats on their glasses and resume them in the app or online.
The company has also upgraded the Meta AI web experience to support features like document creation, image generation, and voice interface optimized for desktop use. Some users will additionally be able to test document upload for text analysis and content generation.
The app release follows a broader move in the tech industry to push AI models into standalone interfaces. Meta currently embeds its assistant across all its social and messaging platforms and is now offering a unified location for voice-first interactions that extend beyond passive chatbot use.
The launch reinforces Meta’s strategy of making AI ubiquitous across its ecosystem, from wearable hardware to mobile devices. It also signals an effort to compete directly with rivals offering increasingly multi-modal and device-agnostic AI assistants.