00:00 – Mishaal Rahman: Android could soon use AI to organize and summarize your notifications for you.
00:05 – C. Scott Brown: And Google Translate could soon take on Duolingo with its Practice mode.
00:09 – Mishaal Rahman: I’m Mishaal Rahman.
00:11 – C. Scott Brown: And I’m C Scott Brown, and this is the Authority Insights podcast where we break down the latest news and leaks surrounding the Android operating system.
00:20 – Mishaal Rahman: So this week we’ve got a couple of interesting stories for you guys. We have a story that I’ve been pursuing actually since December of last year, as well as from earlier this year in March. And they’re kind of controversial because people are kind of skeptical about AI’s use in summarization, especially after Apple had unveiled a similar feature in iOS. But before I get ahead of myself and jump into that story, I did want to kind of briefly highlight the other stories we’ll be talking about before we get into them. And it’s the fact that Google inside the Play Store they’re working on introducing a gaming hub. So if you want to discuss your favorite mobile games, you don’t have to go to external forums like Reddit or the Steam forums. You can just go straight to the Google Play Store. And another feature they’re working on is something built into Google Translate to combat Duolingo. Will they be successful? That’s something we’ll have to find out. But anyways, the first story I want to talk about is this story that I’ve been following for quite a while. This feature will allow you to organize your phone’s notifications as it shows here. So you have this notification bundler or this organizer feature that basically categorizes notifications into four distinct categories. You got promotions, news, social and suggestions. Scott, I kind of want to hear what you think about the idea of AI organizing your notifications for you?
01:46 – C. Scott Brown: So I think this is very controversial because to me, the notifications are already organized very well. You know, you have your silent notifications and then you have your alerting notifications and you can control which, you know, which one goes where. It’s very easy. You get a notification, you’re like, I’ll never want to see this notification or whatever, you just make it silent or turn it off all together. Like, I don’t know, I like having that control because I like being able to know like this is an alert that I definitely want to be alerted about and this is one that I don’t. And so I don’t feel like AI is going to do a good enough job doing that for me. So I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like this is going to be something that I’m going to use. But at the same time, I do know that people like, you know, there are people out there that aren’t like me and don’t want to organize everything meticulously on their own. So they’re going to appreciate AI doing it for them. But for me personally, the organization aspect is not so great. But the really controversial thing is the summary thing, which of course, we saw with Apple previously.
02:51 – Mishaal Rahman: And yeah, summaries, as we saw with Apple’s notification intelligence feature, their Apple intelligence, can be quite hit or miss to put it lightly. You know, we saw the infamous example with the BBC where they implied, you know, Luigi Mangioni had shot himself or that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, had been arrested. You know, clearly untrue statements that were basically hallucinated by Apple Intelligence into basing the original news article headline, contorted those into those statements of unfact. So, you know, it’s when you’re summarizing like a message from a friend, you might get something really funny, you know, it can be something you can share for a laugh, but when it’s something serious like a news article, then it’s not so funny when it can potentially spread false information. So it is going to be interesting to see whether Google can combat some of the issues that Apple Intelligence had with notification summaries.
03:55 – C. Scott Brown: Well, I think that the one thing that you’ve uncovered that to me makes me a little bit more comfortable with the concept is that Google is only going to be summarizing things that are long enough to give enough context. So, you know, if someone sends you a 10 word message, that might not be enough information for Gemini to deduce what you’ve said and make sure that it gives the right, you know, the right summary. An example off top of my head would be like, you know, your father died laughing at the movie we saw last night. You know, that’s not enough information. Gemini could just come back and say like, your father died, and that’s obviously not great. That’s obviously not a text that somebody wants to see. But if it’s a long message talking about like, you know, someone’s day. Like, oh, first I went to the store and then I did this thing and blah blah and it’s you know, a paragraph. Then it’s like, okay, Gemini can actually condense this down. And so the fact that Google is sort of is sort of building in this guard rail by saying like, we’re only going to summarize things that are of a certain length. That makes me feel a little bit more comfortable with it. But I’m still uncomfortable with it because it was such a failure for Apple. Like, I mean it was, you know, laughably terrible. So Google has a big, big thing to overcome here to make sure that it doesn’t have the same fate. And in a way, I bet you Google’s happy that this happened to Apple first because now they’re like, oh, we have the opportunity to do it right. and so yeah, so we’ll see how that goes. But yeah, I am nervous, but we’ll see how it goes.
05:32 – Mishaal Rahman: Although we have seen real world examples of Apple doing something first, screwing up, and then Google implementing in such a way where they kind of implement too many guard rails to make it kind of useless. I’m looking at you, Find Hub.
05:45 – C. Scott Brown: Yes, yes, that is also very true. The Find Hub roll out was definitely a giant fiasco for sure. But, you know, I don’t know, I mean there is an argument to say that it’s better to to to do things too conservatively and not have, you know, in the case of the find hub thing, some sort of crazy stalker story or kidnapping or murder or whatever, connected to your technology. like probably okay to to make that, you know, to to be more conservative about that. But yeah, from the other perspective, you’ve got literally a, you know, over a billion users and they’re disappointed because they’re like, this feature sucks. So, it’s like, you know, which way do you go? So, yeah, I feel like there’s a give and take there.
06:31 – Mishaal Rahman: I just feel like there’s just inherent limitations with a feature just because you’re dealing with notifications which are generally not going to be very long. Like even if you have some sometimes longer notifications, like there’s always going to be a limit to how much text they’re going to be summarizing. Whereas like you’re summarizing an article, right? You generally have at least like 300 words because that’s like the kind of baseline that most authors go for. With a notification, you could have a notification with as little as 20 words or like 10 words, right? How do you summarize something with so little context? It’s just not enough for the AI to work with, especially because they lack the context, the broader context of the group conversation or whatever it’s coming from. They just have those words in that notification itself. So like, no wonder it was such a failure when Apple initially launched it.
07:14 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, and I think that the other summary aspect of the notifications, and you can correct me if I’m sort of misinterpreting this here, but it’s basically Google taking multiple sources and combining them together into one notification. That I can see being useful. So as an example of what I think is happening here is let’s say a celebrity dies. Ozzy Osborne, you know, unfortunately just passed away. So, you know, you’ve got Rolling Stone, you’ve got the New York Times, you’ve got your favorite blogger, you’ve got your favorite person on social media, whatever, all talking about this one thing because it just happened. Instead of getting 20 notifications from all these sources, you just get one notification that sort of summarizes what everybody’s saying. That to me seems useful. Like that seems like something that is adding value to the notification stream that I couldn’t do on my own. But yeah, like summarizing the notifications from my friends and family just feels inherently flawed. Like if my, you know, partner sends me a message, I want to read my partner’s message. I don’t want to read the AI summary of it. Like, I love my partner. I love hearing from her. I don’t want AI as a middle man between her and I. So, you know, I feel like that is not so great. But yeah, summarizing a bunch of notifications coming from different sources, that seems cool to me.
08:36 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, especially for the kind of person who doesn’t really regularly clear the notifications and there are a lot of average people who don’t organize or don’t like clear or dismiss their notifications at all. So I can see that’s why I think personally the notification organizer feature will be especially useful just because like my parents, for example, whenever I see their phones, it’s just a barrage of notifications they have not checked at all, right? So that can be particularly useful for them. But like the notification summary feature, you brought up a good point, Scott. You actually want to read the notifications that, you know, your messages that your significant other, your friends sent you because, you know, like how much effort does it take to actually read those notifications, especially today when like most people just send like single sentences or just an emoji reaction, right? Like I feel like there are very few messages I would actually need a summary for. Like the only cases what I can think of is like really busy active group chats on like Telegram or WhatsApp where you just wake up and there’s like 500 messages. I would just be like, just give me a summary of what people were talking about and then I’ll go back and read it myself. Like that I feel like would actually be kind of helpful.
09:37 – C. Scott Brown: I mean, or it could be like a breakup text, like someone breaking up with you sending like a six paragraph long thing about why they’re leaving you and then you get a nice little summary. It’s like, so and so is leaving you and they think you suck.
09:54 – Mishaal Rahman: So yeah, I think, you know, there are a lot of things we’ll have to see if Google actually succeeds in doing what Apple could not do with the rollout of their AI notification features. Thankfully, just like Apple’s features, these will be running on device. You don’t have to worry about your notifications all being uploaded to Google’s cloud and being trained by Gemini AI. I’m pretty sure this is all going to be running on exclusively Gemini Nano powered devices. We don’t know if this is going to be a Pixel 10 launch feature, or if it’ll be something coming after. We don’t know what devices it’ll be supported on, but, you know, if we do learn more information, we’ll definitely report on Android Authority about it.
So, the next story we want to talk about is something that our colleagues AssembleDebug and Aamir wrote about and it’s the fact that Google is working on building a gaming community forum directly into the Play Store. So this one is quite interesting because I believe last year at the Play Games Summer Press Event, Google kind of made a big deal about how they wanted to evolve the Play Store beyond being just an app store. They want to make it a place like a centralized hub for content in general, a place where you not only go to get apps, but like you stay there and you engage with the content that those apps can give you. Like they introduced the whole manga section within the Play Store where you can browse like the latest hot trending manga or like sports events that are within the Play Store, you can browse like a series of posts and apps that are related to that sporting event. And now it looks like they’re trying to build a forum, a dedicated social hub directly into the Play Store. What do you think about this story, Scott?
11:32 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I mean, I was at the play the Play Store event and one of the things that that they launched that day was the weekly contest where you can hit you hit a button and it gives you, you know, a percentage of play points or you possibly are entered into winning like a physical product of some kind, which changes weekly. And that was what you were talking about. They were trying to make it so that people would come to the Play Store regularly because as of right, well, maybe not right now, but in the past, you would only go to the Play Store to get an app and then as soon as you were done getting that app, you would just exit the Play Store and you wouldn’t go back again until you needed an app. And yeah, Google is trying to figure out a way to get people to not do this. And it’s an interesting strategy because, you know, obviously, I don’t want to keep bringing up Apple over and over again, but at the same time, like Apple doesn’t do this. Like the App Store is just the App Store. Like Apple seems totally content with people just going to the App Store, grabbing what they need, and then bouncing out. But Google seems intent on making it be like a destination. I don’t know how successful it’s going to be. But this gaming forum idea sounds like the first thing that I’ve heard from Google that’s made me think, oh, okay, like this makes sense. Like you download your games from the Play Store, why don’t you go there for comments and tips and tricks and all these other things. Same way I use Steam. Like, you know, when I go to read a Steam review, I do it in Steam. When I go to find out whether or not, you know, something if I’m stuck or if I have a problem or whatever, I go to the Steam forums. They’re right there in Steam. So it’s like it makes sense to me. I think it’s a really good idea. Yeah, I just don’t know. I don’t know if Google’s going to execute it well.
13:14 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, that’s the $100 question because yeah, yeah. Like from what we’ve seen so far, AssembleDebug kind of managed to activate the interface where you actually see your contributions and it’s buried in the Manage Apps & Devices page. Like it’s kind of hard to find. I imagine if they put it there, not a lot of people are going to be able to find it. And like, how many people are going to realize that there’s a forum built into the Play Store? Are they going to actively every single time they want to talk about a game, they’re going to go to the Play Store, search the game, go to the Play Store landing page for that game and then like see the forum there. I feel like it’s a good idea, but there’s already so much going on within the Play Store. I feel like, you know, people are kind of trained already like, oh, if I want to talk about a game, I’m going to go on X or I’m going to go on Reddit, the dedicated subreddit for that game to talk about it. So it is a challenge, like how are they going to surface this to people?
14:02 – C. Scott Brown: You know, you know what’s be a good idea is if there were a separate app just for games, like maybe Google Play Games or something. That would I think change the game a little bit.
14:13 – Mishaal Rahman: Well, I mean, AssembleDebug has reported that Google is actually been trying to migrate a lot of Play Games functionality over to the Google Play Store. So, you know, we might eventually see the winding down of a dedicated Google Play Games app, which would be disappointing but not surprising ultimately because like again, this is one of those apps that I feel suffers from discoverability.
14:36 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I feel like the Play I mean, you know, we’ve already I’m pretty sure if I know they were winding it down. Have they fully eliminated Play Books, the bookstore?
14:47 – Mishaal Rahman: That’s a good question.
14:47 – C. Scott Brown: I don’t know about that off the top of my head. I know they were winding it down, but yeah, like that that is not needed. Like that is an app that no one needs. Yeah, so and the games one is another app that just like, I don’t know, it doesn’t really bring people in. They just go to the Play Store because like once once again, like I said, like most people are perfectly content visiting the Play Store to download their app and then bounce. So, I don’t know, it’s going to take a lot of ingenuity for Google to change that behavior. So yeah, kudos to them for trying something new. And I think this forum thing might be good, but this is certainly not the silver bullet. This is certainly not going to make it so that all of a sudden play is visited by everybody every day, like Reddit or X or whatever. It’s just this is just not going to do it. But it could be a good step towards that.
15:42 – Mishaal Rahman: At the same time, I think, you know, if you treat this as a competitor to Reddit or the Steam forums, there are a lot of games that are only available on mobile and that don’t have dedicated forums on places like Reddit or Steam, obviously, because Steam is primarily all PC games. So I think there is a place for the Play Store that would like carve out a niche that you can’t find on Reddit or these other forms. And it’s just again, going to depend on the execution. Personally, I think Google wouldn’t have this problem if they still had Google+ around because that Circles feature, you know, where you create a group, that was basically like proto Reddit, you know, we had Reddit already in Google’s form.
16:20 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I mean, I feel like if there isn’t a book about Google bungling Google+ then then somebody needs to write that book because that would be a fascinating read of just how many mistakes were made and how many innovative things that were created for Google+ that Google just literally just like let let drown and then have been resurrected to become like, you know, multi-billion dollar platforms right now. So, whatever. Yeah, I think that Google’s ambitions here are cool, but at the same time I’m skeptical that they’re going to be able to pull it off as far as making the Play Store some sort of destination. But we’ll see. There’s also the question of AI, you know, like there’s the question of, you know, like I know for the Galaxy Z Fold 7 launch, Samsung introduced a new Circle to Search feature which obviously is created by Google where you can be in the middle of playing your game and you could pause and then use Circle to Search to get tips on a boss. So you could pause the game, circle the boss on your phone screen and then it’ll pop up with results and be like, hey, this is how you beat this boss. So it’s like, yeah, like if it seems kind of counter intuitive that Google would be developing two different things that sort of contrast each other. Like why would I go to a forum in the Play Store if I can just literally circle what I’m trying to figure out and then have my results pop up in game. Like, I don’t know, a lot of a lot of questions here, but we’ll see how it goes.
17:49 – Mishaal Rahman: I think the AI point is actually quite interesting because there’s also the the other side where if you’re posting content directly in the Play Store, like related to a certain game, you know, that content might eventually get picked up by and Google’s AI and train it to maybe make better recommendations for gaming related content. Maybe if you’re searching for some specific kind of game, there’s like a lot of discussion about a particular game that mentions that kind of genre, what kind of items it has, the kind of play style, whether it’s boring or fun. Maybe that’ll get picked up by Google’s AI because as we know right now, like, when you’re playing when you’re searching for games on the Google Play Store or any other applications, you can there’s like an AI powered Q&A feature and right now it pulls a lot of information from the reviews that people leave. So, you know, if you’re adding additional information about a game in the form of making tips, Q&A guides, or just general community posts about it, maybe that’ll train the AI better to make better recommendations for future gamers.
18:47 – C. Scott Brown: And people who contribute to these forums would then be unpaid content creators which is its own problem, but yeah.
18:57 – Mishaal Rahman: I mean Reddit gets away with it. They’ve gotten away with it for over a decade, so I feel like the ship’s already sailed on that.
19:08 – Mishaal Rahman: So the final story we want to talk about is something that I feel like is going to trigger the skepticism again in Scott because Google is working on a Duolingo rival in Google Translate. So a couple of months ago, we discovered evidence that Google’s working on a new practice feature within Google Translate that will unsurprisingly allow you to practice a desired language. And earlier this week, we managed to activate it. My colleague AssembleDebug managed to activate in the app, getting some screenshots of what it looks like. And it looks quite interesting. Like compared to Duolingo, obviously, which is way more feature filled, supports learning way more languages. Right now, this practice mode is designed to only allow you to learn Spanish and French. But it has some neat features like the ability to create a custom scenario using AI because, of course, there’s got to be some AI in it. And like I think personally, this could be a really good feature because from what I see of people, like I don’t I don’t use Duolingo. I don’t know about you, but it seems like Duolingo is kind of like it’s more performative than actually learning. I feel like a lot of people just use it because they want to keep up their streak more than anything else.
20:17 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, it’s a game. Like they’re just playing a game. Like they’re, you know, whether or not they’re learning to actually speak the language doesn’t really matter. They just want the points, they want, you know, they want to shut up the owl, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. For this, I mean, I think this is great. Like, I feel like everyone should have the Translate app on their phone all the time, no matter where you go, because, you know, just if you if you travel even slight, you know, at all, like you’re going to come across somebody who doesn’t speak your language or you don’t speak their language or or whatever. And having the Translate app on hand ready to go at all times is really to me integral to my traveling life. And so having this built-in functionality without having to download a separate app or have a subscription, you know, which is a huge part of your Duolingo experience. To me makes a lot of sense and I like that Google’s trying to keep it simple. Like it’s just like here are some prompts, here are some scenarios, and you can create your own using AI and whatever, but so yeah, I think it’s a good idea. The thing that’s sort of hanging over it and I think hanging over what Assemble Debug found is that this possibly isn’t going to be free, which is to me the huge roadblock that Google is going to face. If it wants to try to monetize this in some way, then maybe, I don’t know, we’ll see how that fairs.
21:45 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, maybe they’ll bundle this as part of the Google AI Pro or Google AI Ultra. Probably not Ultra because that’s way too expensive for most people, but AI Pro, I can imagine it being part of that bundle. But, you know, I think this is definitely something that they should make for free because this is something that is exactly the kind of feature you would like to see in an AI translation app. I think it could do a lot of good. We’ll just have to see whether or not Google’s actually successful in the implementation.
22:15 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, and it’s also just going to depend on on on how once again, how Google can sort of funnel people to this this new feature within an app that, you know, most people who download the the Google Translate app, you know, people who don’t visit Android authority or sites like ours all the time, they’re not going to know this feature is there. Like, you wouldn’t download the Translate app to be like, I want to learn a new language. You know that the Translate app, its specific purpose is just to translate other languages. So it’ll also depend on how Google can market this, like how can they push people to understand that, oh, we made this cool thing, it exists. And this is something Google is notoriously bad at. On my personal YouTube channel, I made a video that goes over all sorts of Pixel tips and tricks. And I can’t tell you the number of comments that are in there from people that have been like, I’ve been a Pixel user since day one and I didn’t know half of these things existed. It’s like Google has a real problem when it comes to just trying to, you know, we do this thing, it’s really cool, you should try it. Like it does it like at launch day and then that’s it, you just never hear about it again. And it needs to do better to do better at that, I think. And this could be a problem with this particular feature in Translate.
23:26 – Mishaal Rahman: And I do think with the introduction of AI, you know, I know we’re both tired of hearing about AI. This is actually a really interesting unique aspect that would actually make this a legit competitor to Duolingo because it’s hard to create a language learning app with how many different scenarios and things you got to cover, how many different languages. But like with all the languages that Google Translate already supports, all the data it has on like the ability to speak out everything. Being able to use AI to generate completely custom practice scenarios, I think is a really cool feature and something that I think would make it stand apart.
24:00 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I would be very interested in that because, you know, there might be people, there are probably people will travel for a lot of different reasons in a lot of different scenarios. And maybe where is the library doesn’t really mean anything to them because they’re like, I’m never going to the library. But, you know, how to order a specific dish at a restaurant, you know, if you’re a big foodie and you’re traveling because you want to go to all these places and try different foods, like you would want all of your prompts to sort of go towards that so that you’re learning things you actually are going to put into practice when you travel. Same thing if you’re a business person, you know, like business people have different priorities when they’re traveling. So yeah, being able to sort of use AI to cater the apps, you know, the way it teaches you to what you actually do, could make it more could make it even better than something like Duolingo, which like you said, sort of covers this whole gamut of different scenarios. Where’s the beach? How do I go to the library? How do I ask for directions? Like, you know, things that maybe you just be like, I’m never going to use this when I travel. Why can’t I find out how to, you know, get into a government building because that’s what I do for my job. You know, like I don’t know.
25:04 – Mishaal Rahman: You made that sound a little nefarious there. How do I get into a government building?
25:07 – C. Scott Brown: How do I sneak in? I meant legitimately. I meant legitimately for business purposes.
25:18 – Mishaal Rahman: So yeah, I mean, it is kind of interesting to see. I totally did not intend to pick three stories that would be met with skepticism this week. It just kind of happened to be these are the three most interesting things because whenever Google’s working on some new feature, there’s always a little bit of skepticism in the background, like are they going to eventually kill it after launch? Because, you know, there’s the whole killed by Google pattern that we’ve seen time and time again. And then now with AI with how kind of hit or miss it is sometimes. But personally, I think there are good and bad for each of these features. Like the notification organizer feature, I think is going to be decently useful. The summaries, a little more hit or miss. The Play Store forum feature, that’s going to be pretty good if it’s executed well, which that’s going to be the main challenge because there’s so much going on already in the Play Store. And then the Duolingo feature, like it’s good, but if they charge a heavy subscription for it, I just don’t see it catching on or really competing with Duolingo. But if it’s like free and they make it easy and obvious to access, then I think it’ll be a hit.
26:22 – C. Scott Brown: I try to remind myself all the time, you know, to not be super negative skeptical guy because that that’s like all through our industry, you know, us people who comment and talk about technology, they tend to just want to talk about the negatives and just focus on like, oh everything’s terrible and wasn’t it so much better 15 years ago, you know, whatever. And I try not to do that. I try to make sure that I stay away from that. So I want to end this by making sure people know that I greatly respect Google doing all this stuff. Like to me, it’s super exciting to have a company like Google being like, let’s just try it, you know? Like, you got a plan for a weird thing, a forum within Google Play? Like, yeah, let’s give that a shot. Like why not? Go make it, you know? Like, I think that’s really cool and it’s a drastic, like a disparity between Google and somebody like Apple who are incredibly controlling and are like, no, we will not do anything unless we know it’s going to fit our ethos and it’s going to be successful and whatever. So I really appreciate that Google sort of goes out on these limbs and tries things out. But the flip side of it is that it does make it a little bit like you can’t trust Google. Like after they killed Stadia, how many people can trust Google now, you know, like after they spent billions of dollars rolling out this thing and then less than a year later killed it. Like it’s difficult to trust them. And so yeah, I try not to be super negative, but there’s a reason that we’re super skeptical. Like it’s not just like we’re being jerks.
27:52 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, when you’re observing Google do these things on the outside, it’s nice. We’re like, oh, this is cool new technology. But when you’re the early adopter who adopts it and like gets really into it, and then five months down the line when there’s not enough adoption, Google decides, oh, we’re winding this down. That part sucks.
28:07 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, for sure.
28:10 – Mishaal Rahman: All right, and that’s everything we’ve got for you this week. You can find all the links to all the stories mentioned in this episode in the show notes and you can read more amazing stories over on androidauthority.com.
28:21 – C. Scott Brown: Thanks for listening to the Android Authority Insights podcast. We publish every week on YouTube, Spotify, and other podcast platforms. You can follow us everywhere on social media at @AndroidAuthority and you can follow me personally on Instagram, Bluesky, and my own YouTube channel at C. Scott Brown.
28:38 – Mishaal Rahman: As for me, I’m on most social media outlets posting day in and day out about Android. If you want to keep up with the latest on Android, go to my Linktree and find me on the platform that you like best. Thanks for listening.
