Samsung’s Now Brief doesn’t need more AI; it needs to be good

When the Galaxy S25 was announced at the beginning of the year, one of the headline features was Now Brief, an AI-powered summary of important information you might need throughout your day. That information can include weather, fitness, sleep scores, calendar events, and more. It’s been nearly a year since I first got to experience Now Brief at the hands-on event for the Galaxy S25, and I’m sad to say the feature is as useless today as it was then, and Samsung has misjudged what users want from it.

If Now Brief delivered on everything it was supposed to do, I’d love it. The problem is that the real-world experience is a far cry from what was promised. Despite the fact that I have every toggle switched on, as seen in the first screenshot above, all I get from Now Brief on my Galaxy S25 is the weather and YouTube recommendations for videos that are three weeks old. It should have other data to show — I wore my Galaxy Watch 8 Classic to bed last night, went for a walk this morning, have calendar events on my agenda, and I even have smart home devices connected to SmartThings. I wondered if this was just an issue on my phone, but my Galaxy Tab S10 Plus is the same, as if my wife’s Z Flip 6.

So, what is Now Brief good for? Absolutely nothing, unless you find the occasional lockscreen message that can be boiled down to “you’re doing great, sweetie,” useful in your daily routine. There was a glimmer of hope when the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Flip 7 were announced, as Samsung promised that Now Brief would soon support more third-party apps. That news excited me, as I imagined what it would be like if my Tick Tick tasks could appear here, or perhaps even my Asana assignments. Since then, there has only been one addition to Now Brief, and it couldn’t be any further from what I wanted.

This month, Now Brief finally became compatible with something new. Is it a task app, or perhaps a popular delivery service? It’s Google’s Nano Banana. After months of waiting for Now Brief to become useful in some way, all we have to show for it is an AI feature I can’t imagine wanting to use from here. Nano Banana is a fun image generator to play around with, but it doesn’t feel like it belongs in Now Brief.

The way it works is simple. Now Brief will pull up photo memories from Samsung’s Gallery app, and beneath the photo will be examples of prompts you could give Gemini to use on the image using Nano Banana. Maybe there will be some novelty to that for some, but it’s hardly something that would make me start using Now Brief, and that novelty will surely wear off sooner rather than later.

What makes all of this so frustrating is that we already had the perfect version of this feature in 2012. While Samsung is working on Now Brief and Google is making Daily Hub, which was so bad that it had to be removed from the Pixel 10 until further improvements, Google itself had already perfected the idea 13 years ago with Google Now, which debuted on Android 4.1 Jellybean. Unlike the features we’ve discussed here, or the ad-filled abomination that is the Google Discover feed that replaced it, Google Now lived to the side of your home screen and always knew what you needed.

Google Now, despite the lack of AI, was far more intelligent than anything we have today. It knew when you usually needed to get to work and would alert you if there was extra traffic. If you had a package in the mail and the tracking info was sent to your Gmail address, you’d see the progress in Google Now, and the same went for flight and other travel information, too. The part of Google Now I loved most was that it would automatically save where I parked if it detected I was in the car, even if I didn’t use Google Maps to navigate.

It’s frustrating that something that was once so good more than a decade ago seems impossible to recreate today, even with the advancements that have been made in the rest of Android. I hold out hope that one day someone will be able to make a feature like this that’s worth using, but I won’t hold my breath. It might take a while.

How do you feel about Now Brief? Do you use it, or ignore it? I’d love to hear your thoughts.