- Google is working on a new Android feature that automatically summarizes notifications for you.
- Unlike Apple’s notification summaries feature, Google’s version will only summarize conversation notifications.
- This should hopefully reduce how often they fail, but it remains to be seen how useful they’ll be.
<string name="notification_summarization_description">Automatically summarize conversation notifications from apps</string>
<string name="notification_summarization_main_control_title">Use notification summaries</string>
<string name="notification_summarization_off">Off</string>
<string name="notification_summarization_on">On</string>
<string name="notification_summarization_title">Notification summaries</string>Android will let you exclude apps from having their notifications be summarized:
<string name="notification_summarization_excluded_description">Conversation notifications from these apps will not be summarized</string>
<string name="notification_summarization_manage_excluded_apps">Manage apps</string>
<string name="notification_summarization_manage_excluded_apps_title">Allow notification summaries for apps</string>
<string name="notification_app_level_summarize_subtext">Summarize conversation notifications from this app</string>
<string name="notification_app_level_summarize_title">Summarize notifications</string>“Conversation notifications” refers to a specific type of notification that can appear as floating bubbles or as direct share targets in the share menu. They also appear in a prioritized section in the notification drawer, according to Google’s documentation. More importantly, apps have to specifically designate their notifications as conversation notifications; Android doesn’t scan the contents of notifications to categorize them. This means Android will only summarize notifications from messaging apps, since they’re the only ones that use the correct type.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Images of the new notification summaries feature in Android
The fact that Android will only summarize conversation notifications is significant, as it means the OS won’t even attempt to summarize notifications that got Apple in hot water. For those unaware, notification summaries are one of several AI-powered features under the Apple Intelligence umbrella. Apple chose to enable notification summaries for just about any app on your phone, producing summaries that ranged from hilarious to downright perilous. By limiting Android’s version of the feature to conversations, Google hopes to avoid a repeat of Apple Intelligence’s failures, but whether notification summaries on Android will be useful is still an open question.
While skeptical, I’m not ruling out Android’s notification summaries feature entirely until I see it in action. Unfortunately, even though I managed to get the notification summaries feature to appear in Settings, the feature currently doesn’t work. From my understanding, notification summaries will be generated by the Android System Intelligence app, which is Android’s default notification assistant service. The current version of the Android System Intelligence app doesn’t support this feature, though, which is likely why it doesn’t work in Android 16 Beta 3.
I don’t know when Google plans to actually deploy this feature, but it likely won’t roll out in the stable release of Android 16. The feature might appear in one of the Android 16 quarterly releases or even in next year’s Android 17 update, but this is just speculation. I’m interested to see if Google can avoid the pitfalls that have plagued Apple’s version of this feature.