WhatsApp just made its AI impossible to avoid – but at least you can turn it off

Meta rushed to embed its Meta AI assistant into all of its properties, including WhatsApp. Now, it seems like the tech giant is extending the strategy with a dedicated widget, as first discovered byWABetaInfo. This comes after WhatsApp expanded Meta AI from a floating action button to a search bar integration and then the in-chat tag that lets you add it to the group chat.

The widget will give you one-tap access to its text search, camera for image-based queries, and voice input for hands-free interactions. Whether this is useful or just another thing cluttering your home screen depends on how much you actually want an AI assistant embedded in your messaging app.

The idea is that instead of switching to ChatGPT or Perplexity, you can pull up Meta AI within WhatsApp and fire off a question without having to open the app first, as it’s right from a widget. Whether that’s convenient or annoying probably depends on your disposition. There have been complaints about Meta AI being too intrusive, so making it more deeply integrated is a questionable decision by Meta.

Whether this addition is useful or just another AI experiment in search of a problem will likely depend on how much you really need to talk to Meta AI.

Luckily, if you fall into the “no thanks” camp, you can disable it entirely by going into Settings > Chats and toggling off the Meta AI button. At least for now, opting out is still an option.

As Meta is betting big on AI integration, WhatsApp is a prime target simply because of its massive user base. If even a fraction of its billions of users start casually using Meta AI, that’s a win for Meta in the battle for AI dominance. But if users keep disabling the feature or ignoring it entirely, it might just be another forgotten experiment, like Facebook’s attempt at making the Metaverse a thing.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He’s since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he’s continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.