Emma Roth is a journalist who covers the streaming battles, consumer technology, crypto, social media and more. She was a writer at MUO and an editor there before.
WhatsApp will now use Meta AI to summarize your personal chats . You can access this feature by tapping on the button that displays all your unread chat messages. WhatsApp uses Meta AI instead of showing you your messages to create a bulleted list of what you missed.
This feature is currently available in English in the US. Plans are to expand it to other countries and languages in the coming months. The company claims that it uses Meta’s private processing technology to prevent third parties and Meta from spying on your messages.
WhatsApp is owned by Meta and its AI message summaries feature is optional. It is also turned off by default. WhatsApp’s “Advanced Privacy Setting” can be used to prevent users from using AI in group chats. We don’t yet know if WhatsApp will struggle to provide accurate AI-generated messages and notifications, as we saw when Apple launched its AI-generated message rundowns.
Meta has been adding AI features to WhatsApp over the past year. These include a way for users to ask Meta AI questions within a chat and a feature which generates images in real-time. Some users have become frustrated by the new Meta AI icon in the bottom right corner of the app, which they cannot turn off or remove. Meta also caused backlash when it introduced ads to its app, something that its founders had said they would never do.
Private Processing, an app feature, is supposed to hide your interactions with the AI model. It does this by creating a secure cloud environment that prevents Meta or WhatsApp from viewing your summaries. The message summaries won’t be visible to other people in the group.
