00:00 Speaker A It is time for tech support, our weekly look into all things technology, and the tech giant is jumping into the AI game. Meta launching a brand new free AI app available on both desktop and mobile that can answer written questions or generate images. Joining me now with his take is Yahoo Finance Tech editor, Dan Howley.

So far, what exactly can this do? 00:25 Dan Howley Uh well, I have it right here. Uh I downloaded the app itself.

Uh I don't know if we can uh get a get a look at. Oh, there we go. Yeah.

So uh you can kind of see it's it's similar to what you might have with uh an open AI or or Google's Gemini. Basically, it's just, you know, uh you get an interface and then you can do things like ask it questions, and ask it follow-on questions. Uh it offers you, so you sign in with your your uh Facebook or Instagram account, uh and it asks you things like, okay, so where should I start?

Let's get to know each other. It's supposed to be personalized over time, so that as you use it more often, it'll give you better answers to what you have. You can also do things like play 20 questions or restyle uh photos.

Uh there's also a discover page where you can see things uh like what what's going on. This is the Papal Conclave reimagined as whimsical fairytale scene. So a lot of this so far is kind of AI slop.

Uh you know, you're just kind of going through this and I mean, I think I I uh we have some pictures. One was uh a image of uh Jesus washing away the sins of Vegas. This is what it would look like if people dressed uh as with croissants for uh a fashion show.

Uh you know, uh Zuckerberg obviously is seemingly some kind of Caesar-like figure. Uh a bed made out of mashed potatoes. Yeah, so this is all like the stuff that's like flooding that discover feed right now.

Not great. Not a great look out of the gate. Uh but the idea is that this would be a uh uh an AI app onto itself.

So Meta talks a lot about how, you know, uh we have a billion plus people using Meta AI. It's built into Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp. So when you go to that top of the screen, you tap that search bar, I guess technically you're talking to Meta AI.

But if I'm looking, you know, for someone in uh in Instagram or on Facebook, that doesn't mean I'm trying to use it as an AI. I'm just trying to use it to search for people. So this would give, I think, people a better idea, investors a better idea of what who's using meta AI and why.

Um you know, I think that the the idea is that uh this has to absolutely catch on as its its own entity. Uh it's, you know, it's competing with uh open AI, it's competing with perplexity. Uh it's complete with Google uh competing with Google's Gemini.

Uh I guess Siri to a degree if you want to include that, but you know, this has uh a huge base of people already built in as far as uh Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp users. They just have to make sure that this app itself does well if they really want to play in this space. The discover feature, not great obviously as I showed, uh but you know, the the answering questions, things like that, that is uh pretty impressive so far.

Um and you know, obviously you can do things like uh get notifications, you can go back and check your history for things that you may have been searching for or or using it for. So, you know, it's it's it's certainly a means for meta to push itself further into the AI game. 05:59 Speaker A Right.

I didn't have croissant fits at fashion week in my bingo card, but uh we will see all of the multiple use cases that people will find for this app here. Dan, thanks so much for breaking this down and some of the early advancements or uses here that are coming with the app. 06:22 Dan Howley Yeah, neither did I.

06:49 Dan Howley Yeah.