WhatsApp will summarise unread messages thanks to Meta's AI

One click, and a clear and concise summary of the messages that have arrived in your chat is displayed on the screen of your smartphone, without the security of your conversations being compromised in any way. It is the latest frontier of instant messaging, or at least the one WhatsApp engineers are working on to simplify the reading of the most 'crowded' chats through the automatic summary of unread messages. The novelty is an integral part of the beta version 2.25.15.12 of the app for Android released through the Google Play Beta Program: at the moment the function is in the development phase and is not yet available even to testers, but WABetaInfo has managed to identify in the code of the app an initial reference to a button that, when a certain threshold of unread messages is exceeded, will allow a summary of the content received to be generated.

The basic idea is basically to help users 'catch up' within very active group chats or within the various channels they follow, and thus contexts in which notifications can quickly become unmanageable and for which keeping up with communications is an increasingly difficult task. As mentioned, a single 'tap' is enough to activate and display a concise summary of unread individual or group messages, providing a clear summary of relevant information without having to manually scroll through dozens (or hundreds) of contents. Driving the system is a technology, Private Processing (of which many components will be made open source to give security experts the opportunity to contribute to its evolution), which responds to the principles of 'privacy by design' and works with encrypted connections and anonymous credentials to preserve the confidentiality of conversations. All processing, in other words, will take place in a protected context and directly on the user's device, without any data being shared with third parties or transmitted and stored on external servers, and without anyone (not even WhatsApp or Meta) being able to access the messages, original chat content or user-generated requests. The AI that will guide all these operations is obviously that of Meta.

Despite the precautions described above, WhatsApp has decided to exclude the new feature from conversations in which the Advanced Chat Privacy option is active. In such cases, in fact, users have consciously chosen not to employ AI-based tools in certain conversations, and the app will (at least this seems to be the intention) respect this preference. The choice, as reported by WABetaInfo, is due not so much to technical limitations, but to a prudential line based on explicit consent. The availability of the function, for the time being, has no official release date, but many insiders agree that its development is at an advanced stage. In the background remains the promise repeatedly emphasised by WhatsApp (as well as Meta and other digital platforms), namely the adoption of intelligent tools capable of combining efficiency, usability and (above all) privacy protection.