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By Aduragbemi Omiyale

New Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools designed to provide support for users of its applications have been launched by Meta.

The AI Support Assistant will work on the Facebook and Instagram apps, the company said in a statement.

The tools will help users to receive reliable and action-oriented assistance when needed.

In December, the Meta AI support assistant, a tool designed to provide reliable, 24/7 support for nearly any support issue at any time, was previewed.

Now, Meta is rolling it out globally on the Facebook and Instagram apps for iOS and Android, and within Help Centre on Facebook and Instagram on desktop, with even more capabilities and ways to help.

The new Meta AI support assistant is designed to help resolve account problems from start to finish. It offers answers for any question, like notification settings or new features, and can also take action for users on a growing set of requests directly within Facebook and, in the future, on Instagram.

The feature can report scams, impersonation accounts, or problematic content, make it easier to see why content was taken down, provide appeal options, track what happens next, manage privacy settings, reset passwords, and update profile settings.

The Meta AI support assistant can respond to requests typically in under five seconds, dramatically reducing wait times compared to traditional help centre searches or seeking answers on external websites.

“The Meta AI support assistant is a major step in our work to deliver stronger support on our apps. In fact, among people who have provided feedback, the majority report a positive experience with the Meta AI support assistant. It’s rolling out now in all languages supported by Facebook and Instagram for support topics.

“We’re continuing to invest in AI- powered tools to make support more accessible, reliable, and effective — and we’ll keep evolving the Meta AI support assistant as more people use it and as the technology advances, so it continues to improve over time,” the organisation disclosed.

Meta has also deployed AI to improve content enforcement to help users reduce the chance that scammers trick people into giving away their login details, ultimately finding and mitigating 5,000 scam attempts per day that no existing review team had caught before.

Meta said over the next few years, it would be deploying these more advanced AI systems across its apps once they consistently perform better than its current methods of content enforcement, transforming its approach.

“As we do this, we’ll reduce our reliance on third-party vendors for content enforcement and focus on strengthening our internal systems and workforce.

“While we’ll still have people who review content, these systems will be able to take on work that’s better-suited to technology, like repetitive reviews of graphic content or areas where adversarial actors are constantly changing their tactics, such as with illicit drug sales or scams,” it stated.