Android is Copying One of Apple’s Useful AI Features

As evidenced in the latest beta for Android 16, Google is currently working on a new feature for Android, though, it’s unclear when it will launch. Dug up by Mishaal Rahman, the feature is labeled as Notification Summaries, taking your communication-based notifications and then providing a single summary notification that you can easily digest.

Powered by on-device AI, Notification Summaries will take, for example multiple incoming messages from WhatsApp, then provide a single notification that summarizes the messages. This could be helpful for the people who have friends who like to send a lot of messages back to back, like most of the people in my life. We aren’t yet sure how accurate or helpful these summaries could be, given the limited context provided in text messages at times, but this is why we see Google testing it now.

The feature has to be enabled and isn’t available to everyone, but when enabled, users can choose to toggle it, then also control to exclude certain apps. But again, unlike a similar feature on iOS that summarizes for all apps, this feature is only designed for apps that you for communication. We’re talking apps like Messages, Messenger, WhatsApp, and things like that.

Google is testing this, but not openly. Speculated by Rahman, this feature probably won’t launch with Android 16, but could be left as a quarterly update feature or even saved for Android 17.

AI, people. Get used to it.