Android could soon summarize your notifications for you, similar to iOS

Generative AI models are pretty good at summarizing information, provided you give them enough information to work with. If you feed a reasonably sized PDF to a large language model (LLM) like Gemini, it can easily tell you what the PDF is about without any trouble. If you only give it a short sentence that stems from a conversation, though, there’s a chance it’ll miss the mark. Hopefully Google keeps working to improve Gemini’s conversational understanding, as the company is testing a new feature in Android 16 that depends on it: notification summaries.

While I was examining Android 16 Beta 3, I found strings that hint at a new “notification summaries” page. This “notification summaries” page will be positioned between the existing notification history and the upcoming notification bundle options under Settings > Notifications. The new page will have a single toggle to enable the feature, labeled “use notification summaries.” The feature’s description states that it will “automatically summarize conversation notifications from apps.”

Android will let you exclude apps from having their notifications be summarized:

“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.

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.

I’m skeptical that Android’s notification summaries feature will be useful because notifications don’t provide a lot of context for LLMs to work with. LLMs typically have only a few sentences at most to work with in conversation notifications. These sentences can be full of slang, sarcasm, or inside jokes, making accurate summarization difficult. Furthermore, while running Android’s notification summaries feature on-device with Google’s Gemini Nano model is beneficial for privacy, it also means the feature won’t be using the most powerful model available, potentially impacting accuracy.

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.