Google To Enhance Notifications with AI?
New AI-powered features for Android, including a notification organizer and a notification summary tool, have been discovered in the Android Canary channel. This channel is a new program from Google that provides developers with the earliest, most unstable builds of Android. Unlike a beta program, Canary offers a continuous stream of updates with in-development features that may contain bugs and breaking changes.
Notification Organizer
One of the new tools is the Android's upcoming notification organizer. This feature, which was initially discovered as "bundled notifications," will use AI to automatically sort and group notifications. The system will categorize notifications into groups such as promotions, news, and social, then silence and bundle them together. Much like how Gmail sorts incoming mail, the organizer will update a notification channel so that similar alerts are bundled in the future. A key detail is that the AI service for this feature is part of the proprietary Android System Intelligence app, suggesting it could be a Pixel-exclusive at launch. Users will have the option to exempt certain apps from being organized.
Notification Summaries: Google vs. Apple
A separate article on Android's upcoming notification summaries explains that Google is also developing this feature that will summarize conversation notifications. This is a more conservative approach than Apple's version which summarizes all notifications. By focusing on messages from direct and group chats, Google aims to improve accuracy and avoid the pitfalls of misinterpreting other types of alerts.
The more cautious approach from Google directly addresses widespread complaints about Apple's implementation. Apple Intelligence, introduced in iOS 18.1, initially summarized all types of notifications, including news and entertainment headlines. This led to significant issues where the AI misinterpreted headlines, creating false or misleading summaries. For example, a report from AppleInsider detailed an inaccurate summary suggesting that Nikki Glaser had been killed at the Golden Globes when the actual headline was "Nikki Glaser killed as host of the Golden Globes." The inaccuracies became so severe that Apple temporarily disabled the feature for news and entertainment apps.
Google's feature, on the other hand, is designed to be more conservative. It will only summarize "conversation notifications." This limitation is intended to prevent the AI from trying to summarize complex or nuanced news articles where it is more likely to make errors. Additionally, Google's summaries will only process longer messages (25 to 200 words) and will be limited to 50 summaries per day. Android will also explicitly warn users that summaries "may contain errors" to manage expectations. Like the organizer, this feature is likely to be limited to devices that support Gemini Nano, the on-device version of Google's AI model.