Meta is making its AI chatbot more like an assistant

Meta is done pretending its chatbot is only for jokes and image generation. The company just rolled out an update that turns Meta AI into something closer to a personal assistant, one that can peek at your calendar, draft daily briefings, and dig through the web on your behalf. It's powered by a new model Meta calls Muse Spark 1.1, and the pitch is that this thing can finally do more than answer questions and spit out drafts.

What's notable here isn't just the feature list. It's the reversal. Meta's own chief product officer, Chris Cox, told staff last year that the company wanted its AI to lean into entertainment and connecting with friends, explicitly avoiding the productivity arms race that OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic were running. That framing is gone now. Meta is openly chasing the same lane as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, and calling this launch a step toward what Zuckerberg has branded "personal superintelligence."

The actual use cases Meta is showing off are pretty mundane, which is sort of the point. Ask it to summarize your day based on what's on your calendar. Have it scan Facebook Marketplace for furniture that fits a renovation budget. Tell it to find a restaurant and then check your schedule to pick a date that actually works. Meta says you can set these tasks up once and let the assistant keep running them, whether that's a weekly meal plan or a nudge when a product restocks.

There's also a research mode now, one where you can interrupt and redirect the assistant mid-answer instead of waiting for it to finish and starting over, a trick ChatGPT users will recognize. Meta says the tool is better at pulling together information from across the web into an actual report or plan rather than just a paragraph of text.

For now, this is landing in "select markets" through the Meta AI app and on the web. WhatsApp and other platforms, along with a wider country rollout, are coming in the following weeks, per Meta.