Meta AI

Meta AI Review: Free, and It Reads Your Inbox

The Briefing Reads Your Calendar and Mail

The headline feature is a daily rundown: meetings listed by time, a note that the afternoon is clear, and an inbox section pulling out specific items — a school schedule update, a fitness class discount, an estate agent confirming a viewing. It is genuinely useful and it explains the permissions, because none of that exists without read access to a calendar and a mailbox. A reasoning toggle sits under the input box, switching between an instant answer and a slower one, and the app labels its own thinking while it works.

Maps, Shopping and Ray-Ban Glasses

Three surfaces surround the chat. Local recommendations return a map with pins and ratings rather than a list of names. Shopping answers a question about style with named products, merchants and prices attached. And a glasses tab pairs with Meta's Ray-Ban wearables, showing battery levels for frames and case, translation and do-not-disturb switches, and a gallery of what the glasses captured. The image side is a preset library — redesign this room, draw this in crayon — applied to your own photos. All three surfaces sit behind the same chat box, so switching between them is a matter of what you ask rather than which tab you open.

Fourteen Categories, Used for Advertising

This is where it separates from its rivals. Apple's privacy card states that data used for third-party advertising includes purchase history, financial information, precise location, contacts, photos and videos, search and browsing history, identifiers, usage and diagnostics. Google Play counts fourteen collected categories with personal information and device identifiers shared onward. There is no advertising badge on the listing and the app is free — the collection itself is the business model, feeding the same ad system as Facebook and Instagram. Ratings stay high regardless — 4.7 on the App Store and 4.6 across 2.33 million Play reviews — because the assistant itself works well.