Chat Summarization

Summarize conversations from any chat:

summarize my chat with John              # summarize today's chat with John
总结我和 John 的聊天                       # same in Chinese
summarize my chat with Raye from Monday  # summarize since Monday
总结 Maxwell 上周的聊天                    # summarize last week's chat

RingClaw resolves the target chat by name, fetches messages using the Private App client, and sends the summary to the current chat via an AI agent.

Routing Decision

When a message arrives, RingClaw determines whether it's a summarize request through a two-stage process: keyword matching (fast path) and AI intent classification (fallback).

Name Resolution

After permission checks pass, RingClaw resolves the target chat through mentions, agent-based name extraction, local cache, and company directory search.

Name extraction uses two strategies:

1. Agent extraction (preferred): Asks the AI agent to extract the person name from the message (10s timeout)
2. Filler word stripping (fallback): Removes summarize keywords, time words, and CJK/English filler words, then returns the remaining text as the name

Cache (~/.ringclaw/chat_cache.json) persists resolved name → chatID mappings and person info to disk. Exact matches are preferred; fuzzy matches are used only as a last resort.

Execution Flow

Once the target chat is resolved, RingClaw fetches messages, builds a prompt, and sends it to the AI agent.

Time Range Parsing

RingClaw supports multilingual time range expressions in 8 languages:

Relative Expressions

Expression	Time range	Languages
today / 今天	Start of today	ZH, EN, JA, KO
yesterday / 昨天 / 昨日	Start of yesterday	ZH, EN, JA
day before yesterday / 前天	2 days ago	ZH, EN, JA, KO, FR, ES, DE
this week / 本周 / 今週	Start of Monday	ZH, EN, JA, KO
last week / 上周 / 先週	Previous Monday	ZH, EN, JA, KO
this month / 本月 / 今月	1st of current month	ZH, EN, JA, KO
last month / 上个月 / 先月	1st of previous month	ZH, EN, JA, KO
recently / 最近 / 近期	3 days ago	ZH, EN, JA, KO, FR, ES, DE, RU
last N days / 最近N天	N days ago	ZH, EN
last N hours / 最近N小时	N hours ago	ZH, EN

Absolute Dates

Format	Examples
Chinese	4月10日, 4 月 10 号, 12月25日
English	April 10, Apr 10th, January 1st
Slash (M/D)	4/10, 04/10, 12/25
ISO 8601	2026-04-10

Absolute dates use the current year. When an agent is available, RingClaw also uses agent-based date extraction (10s timeout) which can handle more complex expressions. On failure, it falls back to regex parsing.

If no time range is specified, defaults to start of today.

Group Summarize

By default, summarization is blocked in group chats (since the summary would be visible to all group members). You can enable it for a specific group:

{
  "ringcentral": {
    "group_summary_group_id": "1234567",
    "group_summary_message_limit": 200
  }
}

Field	Default	Description
group_summary_group_id	—	Only this exact group ID is allowed to use in-group summarize
group_summary_message_limit	200	When group summarize is enabled, pull this many recent messages before time filtering

When in-group summarize is enabled, RingClaw blocks cross-target requests (mentioning other groups, other users, or "chat with" phrases) to prevent data leaks within the group.

Security

WARNING

Summarization is blocked in group chats when using a bot client, since the summary would be visible to all group members. Use it in a direct message with the bot instead.

• Bot DM: Summarize works — Private App reads target chat, Bot replies with summary
• Group chat: Blocked unless group_summary_group_id is configured and matches
• Without Private App: Summarize is disabled entirely — the bot cannot access other users' chats

Requirements

Summarization requires a Private App to be configured. The Private App needs ReadAccounts permission to:

• Search the company directory to resolve chat names
• Read messages from other chats that the bot cannot access directly