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It seems the age of AI summaries is truly upon us, whether we're fully ready for it or not.
Consider the recent news: Gemini, Google's advanced AI, can now provide detailed overview of changes made to your Google Drive files and generate key points from your emails. Now, a similar feature is coming to WhatsApp: Meta AI (who owns the messaging app) will be able to summarise your group and individual chats for you.
How It Works
According to WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is rolling out a new "Summarise with Meta AI" button is rolling out to some Android beta testers for both individual and group chats. Located just above your unread messages, this feature lets you catch up on a lengthy conversation you've missed.
This feature is opt-in. To use it, you'll first need to enable "Private Processing" in your settings. Once it's been enabled, a dedicated button to summarise messages will appear when you receive a certain number of new incoming messages in your inbox. A private request is sent to the Private Processing system, which securely returns a summary without storing any message data or leaving a trace. AI Summaries won't work if you have Advanced Chat Privacy enabled, which prevents anyone from exporting your chat.
Meta describes this as an "optional capability" that sends your request to a confidential and secure environment. This ensures that the AI can process your messages without anyone – including Meta and WhatsApp – being able to access them, and no message data is stored or traced.
While it's currently a gradual rollout for beta testers, there's no word yet on a public release.
Possible AI Writing Assistant
WABetaInfo also hinted at a potential AI writing assistant for WhatsApp, building on Instagram's existing "Rewrite" function which taps into Meta AI to spruce up captions and messages.
This "Summarise with Meta AI" button has already been spotted in Instagram DMs, suggesting that if Meta is testing it across its biggest messaging apps, there's a high chance we'll see it pop up in Messenger and even Threads in the future.
AI Summaries Haven't Had A Good Rep
AI-generated summaries haven't exactly had a flawless debut across the tech landscape. Just this week, Wikipedia paused its AI summary feature just a day into testing after it was met with fierce resistance from editors concerned about reliability. Meanwhile in January, Apple decided to temporarily pull the plug on its AI-generated news notifications after it repeatedly sent users error-filled headlines.
With this new WhatsApp feature, a few questions come to mind: have we, as a society, become so reliant on convenience that we can't even read through our own messages anymore? And are we truly ready to trust an AI to read through our messages and tell us what's important? Will Meta AI's chat summaries be a blessing for our chats or just another source of digital "oops" moments?
Only time, and a few chat summaries, will tell, I guess.
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News sources: WABetaInfo, PCMag, Mashable, CNN
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