WhatsApp Will Summarize Unread Messages With Meta's AI

Just one click, and a clear and concise summary of the messages received in your chat will appear on your smartphone screen, without compromising the security of the conversations in any way. This is the latest frontier in instant messaging, or at least the one WhatsApp engineers are working on to simplify reading the most “crowded” chats through the automatic summary of unread messages. The new feature is an integral part of the beta version 2.25.15.12 of the Android app released via the Google Play Beta Program: the feature is currently under development and is not yet available even for testers, but WABetaInfo has managed to identify a first reference to a button in the app code that, once a certain threshold of unread messages has been exceeded, will allow you to generate a summary of the contents received.

The basic idea is essentially to help users “catch the thread” in very active group chats or within the various channels they follow, and therefore contexts in which notifications can quickly become unmanageable and for which keeping up with communications is an increasingly difficult task. As mentioned, a single “tap” will be enough to activate and display a concise summary of unread messages, whether individual or group, obtaining a clear summary of relevant information without having to manually scroll through dozens (or hundreds) of contents. The system is driven by a technology, Private Processing (many components of which will be made open source to give security experts the opportunity to contribute to its evolution), which responds to the principles of “privacy by design” and works with encrypted connections and anonymous credentials to preserve the confidentiality of conversations. In other words, all processing will take place in a protected context and directly on the user's device, without any data being shared with third parties or transmitted and stored on external servers and without anyone (not even WhatsApp or Meta) being able to access messages, original chat content or requests generated by users. The AI ​​that will guide all these operations is obviously Meta's.

Despite the precautions described above, WhatsApp has decided to exclude the new feature from conversations where the Advanced Chat Privacy option is active. In such cases, in fact, users have consciously chosen not to use tools based on artificial intelligence in certain conversations and the app will respect (at least this seems to be the intent) this preference. The choice, as reported by WABetaInfo, is not due to technical limitations, but rather to a prudential line based on explicit consent. The availability of the feature, for the moment, does not have an official release date, but many insiders agree on the idea that its development is at an advanced stage. In the background remains the promise repeatedly emphasized by WhatsApp (as well as by Meta and other digital platforms), that is, the adoption of intelligent tools capable of combining efficiency, usability and (above all) privacy protection.