Apple rolled out AI-powered Notification Summaries as part of Apple Intelligence with iOS 18 last year. On paper, the feature sounded promising, using AI to provide a quick summary of your unread notifications. But in practice, it turned out to be such a big disaster that Apple had to temporarily pull the feature and eventually turn it off for a selected category of apps. Yet, this disaster has not deterred Samsung from experimenting with a similar feature for its Galaxy phones, as spotted in a leaked One UI 8.5 test build.
A new leaked One UI 8.5 build for the Galaxy S25 Ultra contains a Notification Summaries feature. It triggers automatically the first time you expand the notification panel in the skin, showing a pop-up that says “longer conversations can now be summarized to give quick recaps.”
If you tap the Turn on in settings option, you are taken to a page where Samsung explains that Summaries will use on-device AI to condense long messages and group conversations (via @SamMobile). This ensures there’s no privacy risk, as your messages and their content are not shared with Samsung or third-party servers.
Google was also spotted working on AI-powered notification summaries as part of Android 16 beta 3, but the feature never made it to the public build.
Like Apple, Samsung will provide an option to exclude apps from notification summaries. By default, though, the feature is supposedly enabled for all installed apps. It also warns that since Summaries will use AI, it can sometimes make mistakes. It’s unclear how well Samsung’s AI-powered Notification Summaries work, as the feature isn’t functional in the current One UI 8.5 beta.
Still, with Gemini’s stronger language understanding than Apple Intelligence, Notification Summaries in One UI 8.5 could deliver more accurate and reliable recaps of unread messages and long notifications.
One UI 8.5 looks set to be a major update
Samsung recently rolled out Android 16-based One UI 8 for its flagship devices. Despite the big version number jump, the skin only introduced minor changes and new features.
Based on all the leaks so far, One UI 8.5 appears to be a bigger update and could feature UI tweaks, a more customizable Quick Settings, and new AI features. The skin should debut on the Galaxy S26 series early next year before rolling out to other Galaxy devices.
