Starting this week, Meta AI will be available across WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger in 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories. However, the rollout will be limited to text-based chat functionalities for the time being.

Meta AI made its debut in the United States in 2023. While the company had originally planned to expand to Europe, it was forced to delay the launch after Ireland’s privacy regulators requested that Meta postpone training on content posted by Facebook and Instagram users. Additionally, the launch of Meta’s multimodal Llama AI model in the European Union was halted due to regulatory concerns.

For now, Meta AI in Europe will function solely as a chatbot. It will assist users with tasks like brainstorming ideas, planning trips, or answering questions by gathering information from the web. European users will also be able to use the AI to surface certain types of content on their Instagram feeds. However, they won’t be able to generate or edit images, nor ask questions about photos. The model is not trained on data from EU users either.

“This launch follows almost a year of intensive engagement with various European regulators and for now, we are only offering a text-only model in the region which wasn’t trained on first-party data from users in the EU,” Meta spokesperson Ellie Heatrick told The Verge. “We will continue to work collaboratively with regulators so that people in Europe have access to and are properly served by Meta’s AI innovations that are already available to the rest of the world.”

In November, Meta began integrating some AI features into its Ray-Ban smart glasses in the EU, though the glasses currently lack multimodal capabilities, such as asking Meta AI about what users see. Meta has emphasized that it does not intend to abandon plans for expanding the European version of its AI assistant, stating that it will work towards offering the same features available in the US over time.