I made Now Brief useful for a day, and it was more effort than it was worth

It’s been almost a year since the Galaxy S25 series launched, and one of the features Samsung made a big deal about at the time was Now Brief, which is supposed to provide an AI-powered snapshot of your day by pulling in data from your calendar, the weather, Samsung Health, and more. We’ve been less than impressed with Now Brief, finding that it rarely has anything of use to show you. On a recent work trip to London, I decided to put some effort into making it useful, and to my surprise, I was successful.

Of all of the things Now Brief is supposed to be able to do, I wanted it to show me ETAs for upcoming events. The idea is simple — Now Brief looks at calendar events with a tagged location, checks where you are, and then works out when you should leave to get there on time. If that sounds familiar to you, that’s probably because that’s one of the many useful things that Google Now did back in the day.

As you can see in the images above, I got it working. After spending a few days in London for a phone launch, I wanted to visit Transformers Battersea before going home. With my train home already booked, I had a limited time to get there, look around, try not to spend all my money, and come home. Unfortunately, while Now Brief worked, it wasn’t helpful or consistent, and it took more effort to use than it was worth.

To get Now Brief to show me a travel card, I had to block out my day with six events, each with a location and time set. In theory, this should work with any event that has a location in it, but since March of 2025, this is the only time Now Brief has ever shown me travel information, so clearly it needs more than a single event to start working. That’s a lot of effort to go to for a simple travel card, but I could forgive it if the feature were at least consistent. Sadly, like most AI-powered features, this isn’t.

Of the six calendar events I set that day, this is the only one I got a card for. A hit rate of one in six is, frankly, awful and means I’d never bother to go to these lengths again. Also annoying is the fact that the route information always defaults to driving. I was using the tube to get around London, so the times and schedules are nothing like what Now Brief was showing me.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but Now Brief’s failure once again highlights what a loss it was when Google discontinued Google Now. Before we had AI over-promising and under-delivering, Google Now could do everything we wanted without large language models or generative AI. It knew where you needed to be, when you needed to get there, and would remember what method of travel you preferred. That was in addition to everything else it could do, like remembering where you parked, tracking your deliveries, and more. It was an elegant tool for a more civilized age.

So, with some effort, you can make Now Brief useful. Sometimes. Maybe. It’s not worth the effort, though. Not when the features we had before worked better, but that’s a dead horse I’ve beaten enough today. Maybe Now Brief, and other AI features like it, will get better over time. I’m not going to hold my breath, though.