How Viber's new AI summarizes your busy group chats

When a group chat blows up, you can accumulate hundreds of texts in seconds, making it time-consuming and challenging to catch up. Viber is leveraging generative AI to solve that problem for its users. 

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This week, Viber unveiled a new AI Chat Summary feature that uses OpenAI's technology to summarize unread messages in group chats, handling up to 100 unread messages concisely. 

The feature can extract the most important parts of your group chat and create bullet points summarizing what was said in the conversation in an easily digestible way that includes key insights such as action items, key decisions, and more, according to the release.  

Activating the feature is simple. When users enter a group chat with unread messages, they will be shown a prompt asking whether they'd like to receive the summary of the missed parts of the conversation. 

The AI Chat Summary feature is gradually rolling out to users in the US, the Philippines, Ukraine, Japan, Bulgaria, and Poland on iOS and Android, supporting over 50 languages. Rakuten said it plans to expand the feature to more countries soon. 

To address security concerns regarding a generative AI model accessing your private messages, the company disclosed that the AI chat summary does not include identifiers beyond usernames, ensuring that conversations can not be "externally connected to any group members." Viber also noted that it does not access or save the conversations on its servers. 

Also: Meta unveils second-gen AI training and inference chip

Several enterprise messaging platforms, including Slack and Microsoft Teams, have unveiled similar, AI-powered chat summarizing features. It's only a matter of time before AI summarizers become prevalent across consumer-facing messaging applications. 

Recently, Google announced that Android Auto would soon be able to summarize long texts or busy group chats while driving and suggest relevant replies for a safer, enhanced driving experience. 

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• I asked Gemini and GPT-4 to explain deep learning AI, and Gemini won hands down
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• I tried Copilot Notebook: Microsoft's new AI tool offers two handy prompt features
• What to know about Mistral AI: The company behind the latest GPT-4 rival