A dotted underline now appears under phone numbers, dates, street addresses and email addresses in some WhatsApp chats. Tap one and a small menu offers the obvious next step, such as saving the number, adding the date to your calendar or opening the address on a map.
Some Android and iOS users have it now, and it should appear for more accounts in the next few weeks. There is no date yet for a full rollout.
WABetaInfo, which found the rollout and tested it, lists what each menu contains. A phone number can be copied, added to contacts or called through your carrier, and a business number also shows the business’s details. A date or time can be added to the calendar, copied or turned into a WhatsApp event. An address can be copied or opened in a map, and an email can be copied or opened in your mail app. The underline appears on messages you send as well as those you receive, and you can ignore it.
Matching happens on the phone
The app finds these items with regular expressions, which look for fixed shapes in text, like an @ sign between two words, rather than with an AI model. That scan runs locally, so WhatsApp’s servers never see the message or the suggestion, and end-to-end encryption is not affected, according to that report.
Once you have tapped an action, a prompt asks if it helped. If you say it was not, you can pick whether it spotted the wrong text or the action was not needed. Only that flag goes back to WhatsApp, not the message. Pattern matching can misread unusual formats, and the feedback gives the company a way to see where it does.
Because the scanner only recognises shapes, it can miss a number written with unusual spacing or a date phrased in words, which is why the feedback prompt exists.
A way into the Events hub
The date shortcut ties into an Events section WhatsApp added to settings in an Android beta, for planning meetups with a title, a time, a place and, if wanted, a call link. A date typed into a chat can now become one of those events in a few taps. Some of the actions, such as copying or calling a number, existed before, but they are now one tap away.
If you do not see the underline yet, updating WhatsApp from the Play Store or App Store is the only step you can take. It switches on for accounts gradually.
