Popular messaging platform WhatsApp has added a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered feature that leverages its in-house solution Meta AI to summarize unread messages in chats.
The feature, called Message Summaries, is currently rolling out in the English language to users in the United States, with plans to bring it to other regions and languages later this year.
It “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,” WhatsApp said in a post.
Message Summaries is optional and is disabled by default. The Meta-owned service said users can also enable “Advanced Chat Privacy” to choose which chats can be shared for providing AI-related features.
Most importantly, it’s made possible by Private Processing, which WhatsApp launched back in April as a way to enable AI capabilities in a privacy-preserving manner.
Private Processing is designed to process AI requests within a secure environment called the confidential virtual machine (CVM) on the cloud by establishing a secure application session between a user’s device and the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) over an Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) connection.
The company reiterated that the technology prevents any third-party, including Meta and WhatsApp, from having to see the actual message contents to generate the summaries.
“No one else in the chat can see that you summarized unread messages either,” it said. “This means your privacy is protected at all times.”
The development comes as the U.S. House of Representatives added WhatsApp to a list of apps banned from government-issued devices, citing security concerns.
