WhatsApp enables AI Writing Help and Message Summaries for Aussie users

Popular messaging platform WhatsApp has announced a new AI feature called “Writing Help” for Australian users which will help re-word, or change the tone of messages before you send them.

It’s perhaps AI’s most used feature across many platforms. People are pasting documents, emails and much more into AI tools like ChatGPT to get the AI to proof read, or help re-write the text in perhaps a more formal or even relaxed tone.

Samsung and Apple have embedded this feature into the keyboard essentially to allow it to exist across most apps, but WhatsApp’s integration means Writing Help is available no matter what phone you have.

If you’ve written a little note, use Writing Help to change the style, perhaps you want something funnier, more supportive or professional. Tap a button, choose the style and you’ll get a few new suggestions.

The powerful part of this is that it’s not using device AI processing, instead a Meta AI Feature called “Private Processing”. Essentially, this uses cloud server power to do the AI grunt work and return results direct to you.

Critically, this cloud environment is confidential and secure, no staff at WhatsApp, or Meta – no one can read or access your personal messages. After your processing is complete, the messages are not stored.

While I haven’t had a full briefing on this, it sounds very similar to Apple’s “Private Cloud Compute” which is all about harnessing cloud power to perform AI Tasks that your phone couldn’t handle.

In addition to the new Writing Help feature, WhatsApp Message Summaries is also expanding to Australia after an initial launch in the USA.

Ever returned to a message thread with someone, or worse, a large group of people to see just an overwhelming number of unread messages. Now, at the top of the unread list will be an option to generate Meta AI summary.

Created just for you, this allows you to catch up fast, and jump back into the chat. I do love the example given above in the image where it’s clearly a parent chat about kids sport, and the summary is “Parents go back and forth on color for Away jerseys” – a typical parental group chat:)

The summary is created privately for you, no one else in the group chat will see it – but it looks like a possible life saver for those too busy to be in the group 24/7.