Meta AI summarises chats from WhatsApp

Jan Johannsen

26/6/2025

Translation: machine translated

Meta AI can now summarise chats in WhatsApp. This should help to keep track of chat groups in particular - and not change the "We don't read your chats" promise.

If you wish, Meta AI can now summarise unread (group) chats. You must actively request this by tapping on the display of unread messages. A technology called «Private Processing» is designed to ensure that neither Meta nor WhatsApp learn the contents of the messages or summaries. It should also not be apparent to others that you have had the chat summarised.

The AI should keep everything to itself

Meta praises the AI summaries in WhatsApp, especially for group chats in which huge amounts of messages accumulate over several hours when you are not looking at your smartphone. At launch, the AI summaries are only available in English and only in the USA. However, WhatsApp has announced that it plans to offer them in more countries and other languages later this year.

Meta seems to be very aware that there is a contradiction between «Nobody can read your messages - not even us» and «Our AI likes to summarise them for you». Accordingly, the company explains in its announcement of the new function:

Privacy is therefore protected at all times thanks to «Private Processing». In layman's terms, this is intended to ensure that only Meta's trustworthy AI requests the data and receives it end-to-end encrypted. It then processes the data in its cloud and sends the summary - also encrypted - back to the device. In turn, no remnants of the data should remain in the cloud, which META could use, for example, to show you personalised advertising based on your chats.

If you want to know more about «Private Processing» and how it works, you can read the detailed explanation and a technical whitepaper on the technology.

Advertising in stories and channels

With the introduction of advertising, WhatsApp recently broke an old promise - not to show any adverts. This again fuelled speculation about the protection of privacy, as advertisers like to use as much personalised information as possible from their potential customers to display advertising.

The personal chat history represents a truly rich data goldmine. Let's hope that Meta at least doesn't renege on its promise not to read the chats despite the AI summary in the near future.

Jan Johannsen

Senior Editor

Jan.Johannsen@galaxus.de

As a primary school pupil, I used to sit in a friend's living room with many of my classmates to play the Super NES. Now I get my hands on the latest technology and test it for you. In recent years at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, now at Digitec and Galaxus. more

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