Meta AI has officially rolled out Arabic language capabilities for users in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
The company said the addition would help the service reach millions of users across countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
Meta has been rolling out languages gradually in the chatbot that now interacts in English, Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese.
The AI chatbot available on the company’s social media and messaging services is based on Llama 3.2, its most-advanced open-source large language model.
Meta is also launching a ‘Elevating Every Moment’ campaign to promote the AI service in Middle-East, partnering with social media content creators and influencers from the region like Yara Boumonsef and Amro Maskoun.
The company said it also plans to simultaneous dubbing for Reels in Arabic alongside other tools.
Meta is choosing to sit out of the “chatbot battle,” betting instead on developing open-source LLMs that would integrate well with its own services — a strategy Mark Zuckerberg has defended many times over the past couple of years.
Sam Altman’s OpenAI with ChatGPT, Elon Musk’s xAI with Grok, Anthropic with Claude, Google with Gemini and China’s DeepSeek are among the lead competitors in the race to dominate the market for wider user interactions with generative AI.