AI can make going through long documents and PDFs a breeze by quickly summarizing them for you. It’s also a great way to catch up on important news when you are short on time. Meta is now bringing a similar feature to WhatsApp, using Meta AI to summarize unread messages in a conversation to quickly bring you up to speed on what’s happening.
Message Summaries in WhatsApp will use Meta AI to generate quick overviews of your unread messages. This feature will rely on Meta’s Private Processing technology, ensuring the AI-generated summaries are generated without exposing the message content to anyone. Your messages are uploaded to Meta servers for this, but the company says no one — including third parties — can access them. Additionally, the generated summary is only visible to you; others in a group conversation won’t see it.
You can go through Meta’s post on its engineering blog and technical whitepaper to get a better understanding of how Private Processing technology works. Reports of the company working on AI-powered unread message overviews first emerged in early May.
To keep privacy-conscious folks happy, Message Summaries remains off by default. And even once enabled, it won’t auto-generate AI summaries of unread conversations in a group chat. Instead, you must tap the unread message notification in a chat to summarize the conversation.
WhatsApp will even allow you to select the conversations that can (or cannot) take advantage of the AI features using Advanced Chat Privacy. Similarly, if someone has advanced privacy options enabled for a conversation, you won’t be able to use Message Summaries in that chat.
Message Summaries could be WhatsApp’s most useful AI feature yet
Earlier this year, Meta integrated Meta AI in WhatsApp, enabling you to chat with the AI chatbot and use it for image generation. In comparison, Message Summaries feels like a more impactful feature in daily use, especially since WhatsApp is the first notable messaging platform to roll out such an option.
Apple introduced a similar option in iOS 18.2, using Apple Intelligence to summarize unread text notifications. But it has been widely mocked for generating inaccurate overviews.
For now, Message Summaries on WhatsApp will only work in the US for texts in English. Meta hopes to expand it to more languages and countries later this year.
