WhatsApp Leverages Meta AI for Instant Chat Summaries
WhatsApp announced the rollout of a new “Message Summaries” feature, powered by Meta AI, designed to help users quickly catch up on lengthy and unread conversations. The highly anticipated feature aims to save users time by providing concise, bullet-pointed overviews of chat content.
The new functionality, which was introduced on Wednesday, leverages Meta AI to analyse unread messages and generate brief explainers directly on the user’s phone. Crucially, this feature will not be automatically enabled; users must opt in to utilise it.
How it Works
To access a summary, WhatsApp users can simply select a “summarise privately” option that appears at the top of a long text chain. Meta AI will then produce a summary, presented in bullet points, highlighting the main topics of the conversation and identifying participating members. WhatsApp’s own example illustrates a summary of check-in plans, noting individual project member responses.
Prioritising Privacy
Addressing prevalent privacy concerns surrounding AI-driven features, Meta-owned WhatsApp has stressed its commitment to user data protection. The company has released a white paper detailing the technical aspects of these message summaries and has emphasised that the feature will remain off by default.
The company behind the popular messaging app states that the technology employs “Private Processing,” which it claims enables analysis without Meta AI directly “seeing” the messages or the generated summaries. This is achieved through a temporary “Confidential Virtual Machine” (CVM) that processes the text data. Once the summary is created, the information is discarded, preventing any further analysis or use by any party.
Rollout and Future Plans
The “Message Summaries” feature is currently rolling out to English speakers in the United States, with WhatsApp expressing plans to expand availability to other languages and countries later this year.
