One UI 8.5’s notification summaries may not be to everyone’s delight

Samsung’s upcoming One UI 8.5 update is expected to bring significant reforms to the Quick Settings and notifications on eligible Samsung devices. In addition to the visual changes, the update is also likely to bring iOS-like notifications summaries and prioritization features. While useful, these features may not please every user.

From the latest leaked build of One UI 8.5, we’re gaining more insights into how these features could work. We’ve discovered some references to these new features in One UI 8.5, and that tells us a few things about notification summaries. Firstly, it confirms the list of languages supported by notification summaries, and that includes English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese (Mainland China), Thai, and Vietnamese.

Additionally, the leaked information indicates that notification summaries will be generated from the notification history of the past 24 hours. To reassure users about their privacy, the summary is likely to be processed locally on the device, rather than sending the information to a cloud-based server.

While local processing sounds comforting, it would require hardware with sufficient power to run on-device AI models (most likely multi-modal) to process notifications. That could mean notification summarization may not be available on flagship devices older than the Galaxy S23 series.

Additionally, Samsung is likely to limit notifications processing and prioritization to the supported languages listed above. Furthermore, the features will only work with one language at a time, and that will be the default language set on the phone at the time of use. That means any secondary languages that multilingual users may use while communicating may not be eligible for summarization features.

Similarly, while One UI could easily prioritize notifications from favorite contacts, irrespective of the language, it looks like the feature may be restricted only to the default language of the phone — at least, initially.

AI scam detection in calls

In addition to these options, we’re also seeing hints for an AI scam detection feature in One UI 8.5. We’ve spotted the following strings pointing towards the feature:

This is likely similar to Google’s scam detection features that warn users of potential fraud by analyzing the caller’s tone.

Notably, the KT mentioned above appears to be referring to Korean Telecom. If that assumption is accurate, the feature may be limited to the Korean language initially. We can’t commit whether these features will be available to users worldwide or not.