When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in February that the company would be building a “new top-level product group” to integrate generative AI into its services, consumers weren’t oblivious to the fact that Meta still has a lot of groundwork to cover before it starts building out more immersive, futuristic experiences for users. 

The tech conglomerate’s initial focus has been centered around testing text-based AI tools for WhatsApp and Messenger, both Meta-owned platforms. 

During this month’s earnings call, Zuckerberg shared that Meta saw the word “AI” used approximately 57 times, hinting that artificial intelligence would be a “key theme” for the company moving forward as it looks to integrate it into all of its applications.

This also comes at a time where the industry has seen somewhat of a “pause” on metaverse building, given many of the industry’s leading brands still haven’t fully understood the “why” behind their foray into metaverse world development. 

On Monday, WhatsApp announced that it is now rolling out a new feature that will allow users globally to edit their messages within a 15 minute window. 

According to the blog post, users just need to long press on the sent message and choose “edit” from the menu, however, all edited messages will display “edited” alongside them, so parties to a conversation are aware that an edit has been made. 

The messaging service said the feature has already started to roll out and will be made available to everyone in the coming weeks. 

While WhatsApp has continued to offer users the ability to delete messages, it does leave behind an annoying “this message was deleted” notification that doesn’t go away, making the editing feature a much more sophisticated update to the user experience. 

Chat Locks

This week’s announcement comes after last week’s update that the messaging platform would be getting a new “Chat Lock” feature that is designed to make it easier to keep conversations more private, taking into account the human element.

WhatsApp says that the new locked chats will live in a password or biometric-protected folder, and that users should not expect to see notifications (or actual message content) from those conversations without going into the locked conversation itself. 

You can see a video of how that feature is expected to work below:

In other news, read about Google’s recent introduction of “Project Starline” that is designed to help create more lifelike communication experiences.