WhatsApp Announces AI-Powered ‘Message Summaries’ Feature

Another day, another application of AI-powered summarization capabilities: Meta has announced WhatsApp now features Message Summaries feature, which taps into Meta AI to summarize unread messages. In this case, the company claims all processing is done in confidentiality, so the messages remain encrypted throughout this process.

WhatsApp Message Summaries

So how exactly does Meta solve the question of privacy even with AI involved? The company says it uses “Private Processing” technology, and here’s a (relatively) simplified explanation of how it works: the process starts from authenticating user’s request, which establishes an anonymous connection to Meta’s servers via third-party relays. The messages are then sent to be processed in a confidential virtual machine (CVM), the process of which is end-to-end encrypted; no messages are retained once the processing has been completed.

You can read Meta’s engineering blog and technical whitepaper for the deep dive; essentially, this approach is similar to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which is similarly used to process AI requests in the event a device’s hardware couldn’t handle the processing onboard, all while retaining user’s data privacy. As with the nature of all AI models though, don’t expect the information to be 100% correct, as “hallucinations” can end up generating convincing information that are factually inaccurate.

More importantly, this feature is opt-in – so the messages will not be processed by default unless you explicitly asked the app to do so. Alternatively, if you just want to filter out some chats from AI processing, you can do so via the Advanced Chat Privacy option in the app. For now, this feature is only available in United States with English being the only supported language, though the blog did point out more languages and countries will be covered “later this year.”

Pokdepinion: Good thing this is an opt-in feature. (Take notes, Microsoft!)