Summarize Long WhatsApp Chats with AI
Long WhatsApp chats break general AI tools. Here is how to handle 5,000+ message threads and still get useful summaries.
Your WhatsApp chat has 8,000 messages. You paste it into ChatGPT and it chokes. You try splitting it into chunks and the summary loses coherence. Long chats are a real problem for AI tools that were not built for them.
Here is how to handle it. The right chat summarizer makes all the difference.
Why long chats break general AI tools
Most AI tools have a context window — a limit on how much text they can process at once. A typical WhatsApp group chat with 5,000+ messages easily exceeds this limit.
When you hit the limit, you have two bad options:
- Truncate — Cut the chat and lose context from the beginning
- Split — Break it into chunks and lose coherence between sections
Neither produces a useful summary.
How ThreadRecap handles long chats
ThreadRecap is built specifically for WhatsApp exports, including very long ones. The system processes the full chat without truncation, maintaining context across the entire conversation.
This means a 10,000-message chat gets the same quality analysis as a 200-message one.
Strategies for very long chats
Even with a tool that handles length, you can improve results by being strategic:
Use date ranges
If you only care about last week's discussion, set the date range accordingly. This is not about technical limits — it is about focus. A summary of everything since January is less useful than a summary of this week's planning discussion.
Filter participants
In group chats, not every participant is relevant to every analysis. If you want to know what the project leads discussed, filter to just those people.
Run multiple passes
For a chat spanning months: