Android is prepping notification summaries. Let’s hope it’s better than iOS

So far, Google has done an admirable job of putting generative AI tools on Android smartphones. Earlier today, it announced further refinements to how users interact with Gemini AI assistant and extended a few freebies, too. Now, Google seems to be chasing an AI tool that has worked poorly on iPhones.

The folks over at AndroidAuthority took a peek at the code of Android 13’s latest beta update and found the mention of“notification summaries.” To enable this feature, users will have to flick a dedicated toggle under the Notifications dashboard of the Settings app.

A thoughtful approach for Android

Thankfully, users will be able to disable notifications for apps that they don’t want to see summarized notifications. An analysis of the strings suggests that the feature will only summarize notifications that host conversational content, such as messages, and no other app alerts.

This is a thoughtful strategy, and will likely avoid the mess that came from summarized notifications within the Apple Intelligence bundle. Notification summaries are a useful way to catch up on the chatter in a buzzy group, like friends or workplace chats.

Google or Apple won’t be the first to think of simmarized notifications. The excellent Shortwave email app relies on OpenAI’s GPT stack to summarize inbox conversations impressively. On the flip side, summarized notifications can often miss the context and twist things into a downright inaccurate blurb.

I’ve often noticed how summaries from Teams chat often merge completely non-related and abrupt information into a sentence that makes little to no sense. It would be interesting to see whether Google’s AI models fare any better at condensing conversational notifications.

Learning from Apple’s mistakes

Apple’s implementation has drawn a lot of flak, including a scathing criticism from BBC. For example, one botched news summary claimed that tennis legend, Rafael Nadal, has come out as gay. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) highlighted the incident and noted that the underlying AI system can’t handle reliable, high-quality news content.

“RSF calls on Apple to act responsibly by removing this feature,” the head of RSF’s Technology and Journalism Desk wrote. “The automated production of false information attributed to a media outlet is a blow to the outlet’s credibility and a danger to the public’s right to reliable information on current affairs.”

In the wake of repeated flubs, Apple eventually recognized that the notification summary system still needed some polish. To that end, the company disabled it for apps that serve news and entertainment content. Apple also began italicizing the font of summarized text in the notification banner so that it stands out.

With the rollout of iOS 18.3’s third beta update, the company added language to warn users that summarized notifications may occasionally contain errors. “This beta feature will occasionally make mistakes that could misrepresent the meaning of the original content,” reads the setup message.

Now that Android is exploring summarized notifications, I am equally optimistic as well as skeptical of the approach. On one hand, my experience with Gemini has been fairly smooth. However, other Google products such as AI overviews in Search continue to fumble with something as basic as the current year.