Meta AI is starting to catch up with Google when it comes to AI-powered photo editing. On Wednesday, at Meta Connect 2024 conference, the tech giant announced that Meta AI will now be able to help you edit photos using AI technology as well as answer questions about the photos you share.

The additional features are made possible because Meta AI is gaining multimodal capabilities, powered by its Llama 3.2 models. This means you can now share photos in your chats, not just text, similar to Google Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGBT.

When sharing a photo, Meta AI can understand what the image contains and answer questions about the image. For example, Meta suggests you could share a photo of a flower and then ask the AI what type of flower it is. Or you could share a photo of a delicious dish and ask Meta AI how to make it. Of course, how accurately Meta AI responds to these and other questions still needs to be tested and reviewed.

Another key feature with the added photo support is the ability to edit images using AI.

After sending Meta AI the photo, you can ask it to make some sort of change — like adding or removing an object in the foreground, changing your outfit, or updating the background of the photo in some way, like adding a rainbow to the sky, for instance.

Meta AI can also be used on Instagram when you reshare a photo from your feed to your Instagram Stories. Here, the AI technology can look at the photo, understand the images, then generate an accompanying background for your Story.

Beyond photo edits, Meta is also testing translation tools for Facebook and Instagram Reels that include automatic dubbing and lip-syncing. These tests will initially be run in small groups in the U.S. and Latin America in both English and Spanish.

Other Meta AI photo features include the expansion of Meta AI's generative AI features and the rollout of tests of Meta AI images shared to your Facebook and Instagram feeds, to prompt users to try the feature.

Fine text during Meta's demo noted the editing features were coming to the U.S. in English first.

Noted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the event, "Meta AI differentiates itself in this category by not just offering state-of-the-art AI models, but also unlimited access to those models for free, integrated easily into our different products and apps," he said. "So meta AI is on track to being the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of this year. In fact, it's probably already there...We're almost at 500 million monthly actives, and we haven't even launched in some of the bigger countries yet," Zuckerberg added.

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/25/meta-ai-can-now-understand-and-edit-your-photos/