WhatsApp has finally rolled out its new message summaries feature in the United States. The messaging platform announced the feature in a blog post, alongside an explanation of how it works and how it maintains user privacy.
The new feature will use Meta AI to summarize unread messages from conversations, and will offer users a neatly organized summary for an easy to digest bit of information. This should make it easier for users with lots of unread messages in their group chats to keep up with everything that’s happening.
In its blog post (link) announcing the feature, the company explains that Message Summaries will use Meta AI’s private processing technology, allowing the AI to generate a summary without messages being sent to, or read by, WhatsApp or Meta. The summary itself will also be completely private and for your eyes only, ensuring that there are no concerns regarding privacy.
What’s more, the Message Summaries feature is opt-in, and is disabled by default. This means that if you don’t want to use the feature, you don’t need to change anything. And if you do want to use the feature, you will need to manually enable the Message Summaries feature in WhatsApp settings.
As of now, the feature is only available in English and in the US. However, WhatsApp says that its looking to bring the feature to more regions and languages later this year.
Toasty Take
Message Summaries in WhatsApp can actually be quite useful, especially for people like me, who don’t read their WhatsApp group chats with any measurable frequency. A handy summary letting me know what my friends and family have been discussing on WhatsApp can be just the feature that allows me to completely ignore every WhatsApp group message and still know everything that was being discussed.
That’s not something you should aim to do, by the way, it’s just how I am with WhatsApp group chats. Not very active, that is.