Meta announced that it is introducing an AI-powered message summary feature on WhatsApp, designed to help users catch up on unread messages without compromising their privacy.

According to the company, the new feature — dubbed “Message Summaries” — leverages Meta AI to generate concise summaries of chats that a user hasn’t yet read. The summaries will be visible only to the user, and not to any other participant in the conversation.

“This is an optional feature and is turned off by default,” Meta said in a blog post, adding that users will see a small icon when the feature is available. “No one else in the chat can see that you summarised unread messages either.”

The update builds upon Meta’s AI infrastructure introduced earlier in April. The company claims that the summaries are generated using “Private Processing” technology, ensuring that neither Meta nor WhatsApp can access the messages or the summaries.

“This means your personal messages remain encrypted and protected — even while you take advantage of AI-powered assistance,” the company stated.

Previously, WhatsApp users could interact with Meta AI within a chat for general questions or by tagging messages for context, but the AI was not able to process or summarise actual message content. With the new stack, however, WhatsApp can now privately access limited context from a chat to fulfil AI-powered tasks, including message summarisation and writing suggestions.

The feature is currently being rolled out to users in the United States with support for the English language. Meta said it plans to expand the offering to more regions and additional languages later this year.

Users interested in enabling the feature can do so via a new “Private Processing” section in the app’s settings, located under Settings > Chats > Private Processing. From there, individual functions — such as message summaries — can be toggled on or off based on user preference.

The launch reflects Meta’s growing focus on integrating AI into its core platforms while attempting to balance user privacy — a concern that has increasingly come under global scrutiny.