Meta has revealed that it is rolling out an AI-powered message summaries feature for WhatsApp users across the United States. Using Meta AI, the feature swiftly brings users up to date on unread messages through a compact summary. The company guarantees that these summaries stay private—available solely to the recipients—and that they do not compromise chat encryption or personal data security.
Meta introduced the message summaries tool as an optional enhancement for WhatsApp, starting with English-speaking users in the United States. The company says users will see a small icon when the feature becomes available in their app. When activated, the AI can generate a set of bullet points summarizing unread messages in any selected chat. Meta explains that the feature works by tapping on a banner labeled "Summarize privately," which then prompts Meta AI to analyze unread messages and produce a summary.
The new tool is designed to allow users to follow a chat when it is large or busy without having to scroll through long messages manually. Although users might have already used Meta AI to pose general questions or tag messages with context, the earlier versions of Meta AI on WhatsApp did not directly get access to personal chats or read them. With the new update, the technology processes message summaries privately without exposing message content to Meta or WhatsApp.
The rollout of message summaries is built on what Meta calls "Private Processing" technology, first revealed at the Llamacon event in April. Meta claims that this approach allows the AI model to generate responses on-device or in a secure cloud environment, ensuring that neither Meta nor WhatsApp can access, view, or store users’ private chats or the resulting summaries. According to Meta’s documentation, only the user requesting the summary can see the AI’s output, and no one else in the chat will know the summary has been generated.
The users fully control this feature. Message summaries are disabled by default, and they can be enabled or disabled in the Settings menu of the app Chats and Private Processing. There is also an Advanced Chat Privacy option that allows a user to exclude specific chats from AI processing or block the AI from interacting with group chats altogether.
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Later this year, Meta will roll out AI-powered message summaries to more countries and languages. Within the last 12 months, Meta has introduced more AI functionality to WhatsApp, such as chat-based AI assistants and real-time image generation tools. However, some users have expressed frustration over the increasing integration of AI and new ads within the app.
The company has insisted that user choice and privacy stay at the forefront in these developments. The rollout of message summaries represents another way Meta tries to improve the user experience on WhatsApp with a high level of privacy standards and direct user control of AI features.