Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR Google is developing an AI-powered notification summary feature for Android to help manage overwhelming alerts from messaging apps.
Unlike Apple’s version, this feature will only summarize “conversation notifications” to improve accuracy and avoid misinterpreting non-message alerts.
It will warn users that summaries may contain errors, will only process longer messages, and will likely be exclusive to devices that support Gemini Nano.
Notifications are meant to be helpful, but they can quickly become overwhelming. To address this, Apple introduced a notification summary feature in iOS, and Google is developing a similar tool for Android. While we still don’t know when the feature will launch, we’ve discovered new details in the latest Android 16 beta that reveal how it will function.
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As we first reported in March, Google is working on a feature that will summarize your notifications, much like in iOS 18. However, Google seems to be taking a more focused approach, possibly to avoid issues that have plagued Apple’s implementation. Instead of summarizing everything, Android will only summarize “conversation notifications.” These are a specific type for messages that appear in a dedicated space in the notification panel, have their own section in the share sheet, and can be opened as floating bubbles over other apps.
Because this feature is limited to conversation notifications, it should only summarize direct messages and group chats, not news or promotional alerts. This approach would avoid the biggest pitfall of Apple’s version, which drew criticism for inaccurately summarizing news articles. However, it wouldn’t solve another major challenge: Google still can’t guarantee a perfectly accurate summary, even for conversations.
That’s because the feature uses AI to generate summaries. While generative AI is powerful, it isn’t perfect, which is why Android will warn users that summaries “may contain errors.” To improve accuracy, the feature will only process “longer messages” and “group conversations,” giving the AI more context and reducing the likelihood of mistakes. If you find summaries from specific apps unhelpful, you can disable them individually by navigating to Settings > Notifications > Notification summaries > Manage apps.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
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