Group chats can sometimes take on a life of their own, whether it's when your friends or family decide to chat while you're busy at work, or if you need to mute a thread for a day to take space from a busy conversation. In preparation for these situations, the Rakuten Viber chat app on Wednesday announced a new AI chat summary tool that can summarize messages into a few key points.
The chat app's feature leverages OpenAI to do this and can scan up to 100 unread messages when creating an overview. When you open a conversation with unread messages, the app suggests creating an overview and, if requested, scans for important decisions and actions to create a reference point. With AI Summaries, the app will mark group chats as read, but you can also scroll back through the conversation if you want.
Viber says these summaries are not stored on the chat app's servers and do not include any identifiers other than the username. This feature is currently being gradually rolled out in the United States, Philippines, Ukraine, Japan, Bulgaria, and Poland. It will then be rolled out to other regions and will be available for both iOS and Android versions of the chat app.
Other texting apps are also incorporating AI features in various ways, which is why Viber's AI chat summary tool has arrived. For example, Meta AI can be accessed as a chatbot from within his WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, but similar chat overview tools are currently only available through various external tools. While Google Messages has primarily leveraged AI for text creation features such as Magic Compose, Android Auto will offer AI summaries of long texts and group chats for drivers. And while Apple currently doesn't have any AI features in iMessage yet, iOS 18 rumors indicate that AI features could be coming to iPhones later this year.