If you’re one of the many active Threads users in the Middle East as you moved from X, Meta is testing a new integration with Meta AI in Saudi Arabia. That makes it the first country in the MENA region to see this pilot, joining the following countries with the announcement coming from the official Threads account: Malaysia, Mexico, Argentina, and Singapore.

Given the list of countries, the Threads team likely chose these countries across different geographic regions for this to get an good sampling and maybe even based it on user activity. While Meta AI has been available in the MENA region with Arabic language support, that may have factored into selecting the country. Does that mean Saudi Arabia is a major active user market on Threads?

Ask and Meta AI responds

This works similarly to X’s Grok – mention the account in a reply with your question and the account it self responds. Users with a public account will be able to mention Meta AI in a post or a reply to get more context.

Connor Hayes (Head of Threads) posted it from his Threads account that this is designed to provide real-time context about trends and breaking stories. It’ll also work on receiving recommendations within conversations.

For all the Threads users in Saudi Arabia, that means you can mention the Meta AI account to ask questions. It’ll interpret that as a command to process it, and respond as a public reply authored by the @meta.ai account. The best part is that the account will respond in the language used in the post it was mentioned in, which likely means that it includes Arabic as well.

With this integration Threads is position itself as a hub for chatting about news and trends. That’s also accompanied with getting information and recommendations without having to leave the app.

There are some risks that accompany this pilot. Hopefully, Meta AI has stronger safeguards in place but users will have to be the judge on this.

Given the Threads algorithm, you’ll likely also see replies to orignal posts showing up more frequently. If you want to see fewer replies in your feed, you’ve got three ways to tackle it:

• Mute the @meta.ai Threads account
• Use the “Not interested” option on any reply post
• Hide a Meta AI reply that appears directly on your post.

Future expansion

As this is a beta test, Threads is definitely going to learn from early feedback and will continue to improving the experience. That would likley also mean that they may expand it to more users in the future – maybe even across the MENA region.