Skift Take
If Meta wants its new AI chatbot to be used for travel, it has some catching up to do.
Since ChatGPT was released last November, several other well-funded companies have released their own versions in an effort to compete.
The latest was Meta, which late last month released the beta version of a generative AI chatbot, called Meta AI, on mobile versions of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. The chatbot is powered by Meta’s proprietary large language model, similar to how OpenAI’s model powers ChatGPT and Google’s model powers Bard.
As with ChatGPT and the others, Meta AI can respond to questions about planning trips, booking flights, and more.
I tested the chatbot on WhatsApp to see how it performs for trip planning, and a few issues jumped out right away.
First, there were quite a few errors in its responses. For example, it "forgot" what was being discussed and had to be given the same prompt twice within one conversation. It also provided links to articles with its answers, but some were years old with outdated information.
Itinerary creation was another issue. It's one thing that ChatGPT did fairly well from the start: an easily digestible list that often includes context, produced immediately with a single prompt. Google released