What does this article cover?

What are Summaries?

This feature is in alpha for a small % of servers. You can check to see if you have it available by going to your Server Settings > Overview page and looking for the Enable Summaries option.

At times it can be difficult to quickly find context to conversations without having to endlessly scroll and parse your way through many messages in a channel. This takes away time where you can be responding to and participating in a conversation more immediately.

To address this, our team at Discord is introducing Summaries. We are experimenting with the power of OpenAI technology to quickly surface topics in any text channel, get a conversation preview and the number of messages in a specific topic, and indicate who is in the discussion.

Being able to quickly jump back into a conversation has become that much easier no matter how much you’ve missed.

How to enable Summaries AI

Desktop

To turn on Summaries for your server, go to your Server Settings > Overview.

Mobile

Summaries are not yet available on mobile, but will be available soon.

Where to find the Summaries AI?

Currently, there are two main ways to see topics in a channel.

Topic Subheader

When in a text channel, you’ll now see a new subheader showing the currently viewed topic. Instead of having to read individual messages to figure out what’s going on, you can get a quick sense for what is being talked about. We’ve also included small arrows to help you go back and forth between previous topics.

Summaries List

If you want to skim through a list of conversations, you can click the currently shown topic in the subheader. This opens a panel where you can see a list of conversations, their associated topic, a short snippet, and some of the participants involved. Selecting any of these conversations will navigate you to the beginning of that discussion.

These surfaced conversations and their topics are subject to change based on user feedback our team receives.

How to Control Summaries

During the beta, there are two main ways to control summaries.

For members: Hiding the UI

Any member can show / hide the Summaries UI in channels with the Icon in the header.

For modmins: disabling certain channels

If Summaries aren’t useful in specific channels (e.g. information, bot logs, etc.), anyone with the Manage Channel permission can disable summaries in that channel via the toggle in that channel’s settings.

Frequently Asked Questions

In case there are some questions that need answers.

Q: What does OpenAI know about me?

A: Summaries is a Discord service and therefore any data it uses is governed by our Privacy Policy. If enabled, Summaries will access certain information such as messages to create the summaries for you. While Summaries AI uses OpenAI technology, OpenAI may not use Discord user data to train its general models.