Notification highlights is one of the new Galaxy AI features Samsung has introduced with One UI 8.5. It offers two functions: prioritizing notifications and summarizing notifications.

Priority notifications are not new to Samsung’s One UI. They have long been a basic part of the Android operating system, and Samsung is simply using AI to prioritize notifications based on what it knows about you (it essentially uses your Samsung account profile information, which includes details like pet name, as the starting point).

Summarizing notifications, on the other hand, is something we’re seeing for the first time. When I started using a Galaxy S26-series phone, one of the first things I did was check the notification summary settings to see whether the feature is customizable.

It’s not. Notification summaries work automatically based on what Galaxy AI thinks is worth summarizing and which apps would benefit from it. Initially, I didn’t like this, because for the first couple of days I didn’t see the feature doing anything, which left me wondering if manually selecting which apps it works for might help.

But after a few days, I realized that this is exactly how the feature is supposed to work. Notification summaries are designed to stay out of your way. They quietly step in when a notification is long or cluttered and turn it into something shorter and easier to read.

The summary also only appears when notifications are collapsed. If you expand a notification, it switches to the full message or the original notification content. That means the summary helps you understand what a notification is about at a glance, but the full details can be quickly accessed if needed.

Eventually, I noticed that I was reading summarized notifications without even realizing they were summaries. They just felt like normal notifications that were easier to read. And that’s exactly why I like this feature so much: it’s simple, seamless, and quietly does its job.

Samsung recently told us in an interview that the mobile industry’s next big shift could be “AI-first” phones. Instead of users constantly asking their devices to do things, AI would work more proactively in the background, handling tasks like summarizing emails or organizing information.

In a small way, notification summaries in One UI 8.5 already feel like a step in that direction. They don’t require any setup or constant interaction and simply step in when needed. If this is the kind of AI experience Samsung is aiming for, I’m all for it.

While you don't need to customize the notification summary feature, you will need to enable it the first time you use a device that supports it. You can do that from the phone's Settings > Galaxy AI > Notification highlights > Summarize notifications menu. You will need the official One UI 8.5 update for this if you're not using a Galaxy S26 or newer phone.

The feature works in the following languages: English, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese (Mainland China), Japanese, Polish, Hindu, Thai, and Vietnamese, at least initially. The list of supported languages could change later.