Article by Danai Nesta Kupemba: “Big Tech’s newest personal agents — Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots — promise to book tables at restaurants, buy groceries, and carry out other types of digital grunt work for users.
Consumers are opting in. Muse has been downloaded 9 million times in the U.S. and Canada since its launch on September 8, market intelligence company AppMagic, told Rest of World. As many as 1.8 million people use the app daily.
Meta aspires to a global launch. “[We] are quite excited to bring personal agents to billions of people around the world,” Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, told the Financial Times.
Some startups are already building agents in markets that Big Tech hopes to reach. For instance, South African startup ManyHands offers Manny, a personal assistant designed to order groceries, book appointments and make payments through WhatsApp. But adapting agents to local conditions has its challenges. Anton Moulder, ManyHands’ founder, told Rest of World that getting the AI assistant to converse in all of South Africa’s 11 official spoken languages has been difficult.
Rest of World spoke to AI researchers and other experts to understand how these personal agents would perform outside Western nations.
Would AI agents understand the local language and culture?
English speakers could benefit more from AI agents, which run on top of large language models that underperform in many non-English languages.
“Linguistic inclusion is ultimately about power,” Payal Arora, professor of inclusive AI cultures at Utrecht University and the founder of Inclusive AI Lab, told Rest of World.
Meta has said that expanding Muse internationally would require support for local languages and integration with local services.
AI agents would also need to understand the local culture, including the unique ways people communicate and bargain. “In many parts of the Global South, meaning is deeply contextual, shaped by family, community, religion, local institutions, and informal social networks,” Arora said.
Without that understanding, agents might impose Western assumptions on their users, Usha Raman, an independent researcher on AI policy and digital culture, told Rest of World. “The danger then is that existing forms of cultural and economic hegemony continue and the rest of the world is forced to adapt,” she said…(More)”.
