AI is everywhere! I write essays photo editingcreating slop on social networks, you're watching for you, doing a lot of mistakes– and now, if you've installed the latest Android 16 update (currently rolling out to Pixel phones), summarize your notifications so you have less text and fewer alerts to look through.
new summary functionGoogle says it will “help you sort through the clutter and stay focused” and give you “fast insight and context at a glance.” I'm all about cutting out the clutter, so as soon as the update arrived on my own Pixel device, I decided to enable the feature and see how useful it actually was.
How AI summaries work and how to enable them
Enable the feature on your Android phone.
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After the update, AI notification summaries won't be sent to your phone automatically—you'll need to enable them manually. In settings go to Notificationsthen touch Notification Summary to enable this. On the same screen, you can choose which apps you want to receive summary notifications for.
There are actually two parts to the new update: the actual notification summary and what Google calls the “notification organizer.” This organizer is designed to group and mute lower priority notifications (including social alerts and promotional messages), although there doesn't appear to be a dedicated toggle switch for this.
Of course, other Android phone manufacturers will be able to implement this as they see fit. Looks like Samsung function testing with One UI 8.5, which is due to launch in beta any day now. The full software release is expected early next year with Galaxy S26 phones.
Using a 24-hour AI notification summary
Ready to banish notification clutter from my life, I turned on AI summaries for all my apps to see exactly how it works. Let's start with the fact that this doesn't apply to all apps, at least not yet: my Snapchat and Instagram alerts remain the same as always, so further updates from Google and app developers will be needed before this becomes something you'll see everywhere.
The apps I saw summaries for most often were Google Chat, WhatsApp and Slack – almost always in group conversations, and sometimes for individual messages (message length seems to have something to do with this). And the resumes were… mostly good. They tended to get the gist of who said what, and in that sense were an exact replica of what I was missing without actually opening those apps.
Resumes only work up to a point.
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These summaries were updated as new messages were added, but the summary preview window is only a couple of lines long, so once a few people start gathering in a group chat, the summary won't be able to cover everything. From the lock screen and drop-down notification panel, you can expand notifications to view entire messages (as usual), and then collapse them back into a summary view.
What are your thoughts so far?
There was one instance where AI notification summaries were confused due to a Lifehacker vulnerability and various @mentions included – the message was attributed to the person tagged in the message rather than the person who sent it. Overall, however, there were no obvious errors, just some details that were left out of the summary of longer conversations that I would have liked to know about.
Now that I've tested it, I'm going to disable it again for several reasons – and inaccuracy isn't really one of them (though it can certainly creep in). First, given the small size of the preview window, I'm not sure the AI ​​summary is any more useful than the first couple of lines of text that you get as standard anyway. This is usually enough to determine whether a message is important before opening it.
This Slack summary was not entirely accurate, and Snapchat alerts were not affected.
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Secondly, I'm not sure I really want my messages and group chats summarized – at least not the most important ones. If a friend, family member, or work colleague has something to tell me, I want to know exactly what it is rather than read a summary. It feels like AI is being used for nothing – and not for the first time.
By the way, I didn't see any evidence of the notification organizer working, perhaps because of the way I set up Android notifications – Android now has a lot of granular options for muting and dismissing notifications. This feature seems vaguely useful, but again, I'm not sure I'm ready to hand over the job of judging the importance of notifications to AI just yet.
