00:00 – Mishaal Rahman: Android could soon use AI to organize and summarize your notifications for you.
00:05 – C. Scott Brown: And Google Translate could soon take on Duolingo with its Practice mode.
00:09 – Mishaal Rahman: I’m Mishaal Rahman.
00:11 – C. Scott Brown: And I’m C Scott Brown, and this is the Authority Insights podcast where we break down the latest news and leaks surrounding the Android operating system.
00:20 – Mishaal Rahman: So this week we’ve got a couple of interesting stories for you guys. We have a story that I’ve been pursuing actually since December of last year, as well as from earlier this year in March. And they’re kind of controversial because people are kind of skeptical about AI’s use in summarization, especially after Apple had unveiled a similar feature in iOS. But before I get ahead of myself and jump into that story, I did want to kind of briefly highlight the other stories we’ll be talking about before we get into them. And it’s the fact that Google inside the Play Store they’re working on introducing a gaming hub. So if you want to discuss your favorite mobile games, you don’t have to go to external forums like Reddit or the Steam forums. You can just go straight to the Google Play Store. And another feature they’re working on is something built into Google Translate to combat Duolingo. Will they be successful? That’s something we’ll have to find out. But anyways, the first story I want to talk about is this story that I’ve been following for quite a while. This feature will allow you to organize your phone’s notifications as it shows here. So you have this notification bundler or this organizer feature that basically categorizes notifications into four distinct categories. You got promotions, news, social and suggestions. Scott, I kind of want to hear what you think about the idea of AI organizing your notifications for you?
01:46 – C. Scott Brown: So I think this is very controversial because to me, the notifications are already organized very well. You know, you have your silent notifications and then you have your alerting notifications and you can control which, you know, which one goes where. It’s very easy. You get a notification, you’re like, I’ll never want to see this notification or whatever, you just make it silent or turn it off all together. Like, I don’t know, I like having that control because I like being able to know like this is an alert that I definitely want to be alerted about and this is one that I don’t. And so I don’t feel like AI is going to do a good enough job doing that for me. So I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like this is going to be something that I’m going to use. But at the same time, I do know that people like, you know, there are people out there that aren’t like me and don’t want to organize everything meticulously on their own. So they’re going to appreciate AI doing it for them. But for me personally, the organization aspect is not so great. But the really controversial thing is the summary thing, which of course, we saw with Apple previously.
02:51 – Mishaal Rahman: And yeah, summaries, as we saw with Apple’s notification intelligence feature, their Apple intelligence, can be quite hit or miss to put it lightly. You know, we saw the infamous example with the BBC where they implied, you know, Luigi Mangioni had shot himself or that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, had been arrested. You know, clearly untrue statements that were basically hallucinated by Apple Intelligence into basing the original news article headline, contorted those into those statements of unfact. So, you know, it’s when you’re summarizing like a message from a friend, you might get something really funny, you know, it can be something you can share for a laugh, but when it’s something serious like a news article, then it’s not so funny when it can potentially spread false information. So it is going to be interesting to see whether Google can combat some of the issues that Apple Intelligence had with notification summaries.
03:55 – C. Scott Brown: Well, I think that the one thing that you’ve uncovered that to me makes me a little bit more comfortable with the concept is that Google is only going to be summarizing things that are long enough to give enough context. So, you know, if someone sends you a 10 word message, that might not be enough information for Gemini to deduce what you’ve said and make sure that it gives the right, you know, the right summary. An example off top of my head would be like, you know, your father died laughing at the movie we saw last night. You know, that’s not enough information. Gemini could just come back and say like, your father died, and that’s obviously not great. That’s obviously not a text that somebody wants to see. But if it’s a long message talking about like, you know, someone’s day. Like, oh, first I went to the store and then I did this thing and blah blah and it’s you know, a paragraph. Then it’s like, okay, Gemini can actually condense this down. And so the fact that Google is sort of is sort of building in this guard rail by saying like, we’re only going to summarize things that are of a certain length. That makes me feel a little bit more comfortable with it. But I’m still uncomfortable with it because it was such a failure for Apple. Like, I mean it was, you know, laughably terrible. So Google has a big, big thing to overcome here to make sure that it doesn’t have the same fate. And in a way, I bet you Google’s happy that this happened to Apple first because now they’re like, oh, we have the opportunity to do it right. and so yeah, so we’ll see how that goes. But yeah, I am nervous, but we’ll see how it goes.
05:32 – Mishaal Rahman: Although we have seen real world examples of Apple doing something first, screwing up, and then Google implementing in such a way where they kind of implement too many guard rails to make it kind of useless. I’m looking at you, Find Hub.
05:45 – C. Scott Brown: Yes, yes, that is also very true. The Find Hub roll out was definitely a giant fiasco for sure. But, you know, I don’t know, I mean there is an argument to say that it’s better to to to do things too conservatively and not have, you know, in the case of the find hub thing, some sort of crazy stalker story or kidnapping or murder or whatever, connected to your technology. like probably okay to to make that, you know, to to be more conservative about that. But yeah, from the other perspective, you’ve got literally a, you know, over a billion users and they’re disappointed because they’re like, this feature sucks. So, it’s like, you know, which way do you go? So, yeah, I feel like there’s a give and take there.
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