11 hours ago
WhatsApp's new AI feature lets you skip the scroll
If you've ever opened a group chat on WhatsApp and felt a knot in your stomach at the sight of endless unread messages, help is at hand.
Meta-owned WhatsApp has just announced Private Message Summaries, which does what it says on the tin by offering an overview of your unread messages, saving you from endless scrolling as you try to get your head around the content of a conversation.
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In the company's own words, WhatsApp's new Private Message Summaries feature uses Meta AI 'to privately and quickly summarize unread messages in a chat, so you can get an idea of what is happening, before reading the details in your unread messages.'
Message Summaries uses Meta's Private Processing technology. This allows Meta's AI smarts to create a response without Meta or WhatsApp ever seeing your messages or the private summaries.
Additionally, others in the chat won't know that you chose to summarize your unread messages.
How to use Private Message Summaries
Private Message Summaries won't automatically appear. Instead, you'll see a 'summarize privately' message appear intermittently on the same button that displays how many unread messages you have. Simply tap on the button to bring up a summary of your undead messages.
Message Summaries is rolling out in English to U.S.-based users, with WhatsApp aiming to bring it to other languages and countries later this year.
Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the you-know-what, so try it out for yourself to gauge the accuracy of WhatsApp's new Private Message Summaries feature. We certainly hope it'll be free of the mishaps that plagued Apple's much-mocked AI-powered notification summaries, which made headlines for all the wrong reasons toward the end of last year.
In other WhatsApp news, Meta recently announced that ads are coming to the messaging app for the first time in its 16-year history … though you may never see them.
