WhatsApp may soon use AI to automatically summarize your conversations
Meta has been making waves lately with new features for WhatsApp, including the controversial rollout of ads in Status and Channels. Now, the company is introducing another major update: AI-generated message summaries .
This new feature, called “Message Summaries” , is designed to help users catch up on long or overwhelming conversations — especially useful when you’re buried under unread messages.
Let’s dive into what this means, how it works, and what Meta is promising when it comes to your privacy.
💬 What Are Message Summaries?
If you’ve ever opened a group chat with hundreds of unread messages, you know the frustration. Catching up can feel like reading a novel just to understand a simple plan or decision.
That’s where Message Summaries come in.
With this feature enabled, WhatsApp will use Meta’s artificial intelligence to generate a short, text-based summary of a conversation. This way, you can quickly get the main points without having to scroll through every single message.
Currently, the feature is available in English for users in the United States, but Meta plans to roll it out globally sometime next year.
🔒 Privacy First? Meta Promises “Private Processing”
When it comes to messaging apps, privacy is non-negotiable , especially for WhatsApp, which markets itself as an end-to-end encrypted service.
So naturally, people are asking:
“How does Meta ensure my private messages stay private while using AI to summarize them?”
To address these concerns, Meta says it’s using a technology it calls Private Processing . According to the company, this system ensures that neither Meta nor WhatsApp can access:
- The original messages
- The generated summaries
But how exactly does that work?
🧪 Behind the Scenes: Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)
Meta published a detailed technical white paper explaining how the system maintains privacy during processing.
At the heart of this system are Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) — secure, isolated environments built directly into server hardware, such as NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
Here’s how it works:
- Your phone establishes a direct, encrypted connection to one of these TEEs.
- It sends the selected messages for summarization.
- The AI processes the data inside the secure environment.
- Only the final summary is returned to your device.
- After processing, no message data is stored .
Even better: Meta claims that its own engineers and systems cannot access the contents of the TEE — meaning they can’t peek at your messages either.
🔐 Trust, But Verify: Remote Attestation
Of course, trusting a black box isn’t enough. So Meta uses a process called remote attestation to prove that each TEE is legitimate.
Before any data is sent, your phone asks the server for cryptographic proof that the TEE is running the correct, unmodified software.
This proof is signed by the hardware itself and verified against a public record logged with trusted third parties like Cloudflare .
Only if everything checks out will the phone send your message data for processing.
⚙️ User Control Is Key
Meta says user control remains central to this feature:
- The feature is off by default.
- You can enable it manually via a setting under “Advanced Chat Privacy.”
- There, you can choose which chats are allowed to be processed by AI.
This gives users full transparency and choice — two critical factors in maintaining trust with a privacy-conscious audience.
🌍 What’s Next?
As mentioned earlier, Message Summaries is currently rolling out to English-speaking users in the US. Meta plans to expand the feature to other languages and regions over the coming months.
Whether this feature becomes widely adopted will depend on how well it balances utility with privacy — something WhatsApp will need to continue proving as the rollout progresses.