The announcement was made by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Conversations, an annual business messaging event in Sao Paulo.
 "Meta Verified rolls out in India and Brazil, WhatsApp adds more AI tools for businesses")
Shivani Shinde Mumbai
With a focus on improving ease of doing business on WhatsApp, parent company Meta has announced the rollout of 'Meta Verified' in India, Brazil, Indonesia and Colombia.
The announcement, along with other news, was made by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company's annual business messaging event, Conversations, in Sao Paulo.
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“We are also starting to roll out Meta Verified to the WhatsApp Business app in Brazil, India, Indonesia and Colombia. When you see the Meta Verified badge, it means that a business has their information registered with Meta,” he said in a speech at the event.
It added that businesses using Meta Verified receive enhanced account support (including impersonation prevention) and allow employees to use WhatsApp on multiple devices.
Meta also announced it is expanding the ways businesses can support their customers to include voice calling on its WhatsApp Business platform, allowing customers to speak directly with businesses about larger purchases or more complex questions that can't be resolved through chat.
The social media giant also announced a number of features powered by artificial intelligence (AI). First, AI will power more of WhatsApp's services, including access to different languages on the platform. Zuckerberg said Meta AI will also launch in Portuguese next month, and in several other languages.
“In April, we launched a new version of Meta AI with our latest model, Llama 3. Next month, we are happy to announce that we will be releasing the Portuguese version of Meta AI, along with several other new languages. This means more people around the world will be able to ask the Assistant questions through our app,” he said.
He said the company's vision is not just to build one AI assistant, but to enable a variety of AIs that can be used for different purposes, including for businesses. “Any business should be able to quickly spin up an agent that can converse with customers, provide support and drive commerce,” he added.
AI will also be used to help businesses engage with their users more effectively. Until now, businesses would typically send messages to all customers who opted in to receive updates on WhatsApp. But now, with Ads Manager, Meta's AI system can recommend the right subset of recipients, delivering messages to those likely to be most interested.
