I love how simple One UI 8.5’s AI notification shortcuts are

The notification highlight is one of the new Galaxy AI features introduced by Samsung with One UI 8.5. It offers two functions: prioritizing notifications and summarizing notifications.

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

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

That’s not the case. Notification summaries work automatically based on what Galaxy AI thinks should be summarized and which apps can benefit from it. At first, I didn’t like this, because in the first few days I didn’t see the feature doing anything, which left me wondering if manually choosing which apps we work on would help.

But after a few days, I realized that this is exactly how the feature should work. Notification shortcuts are designed to stay out of your way. They quietly step in when the notification is long or dense and make it something short and easy to read.

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

Finally, I realized that I had been reading summary notices without realizing that they were summaries. They just felt like regular notifications that were easy to read. And that’s why I like this feature so much: it’s simple, seamless, and does its job quietly.

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

Little by little, the notification shortcuts in One UI 8.5 already feel like a step in that direction. They don’t require any setup or ongoing communication and just 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 Settings > Galaxy AI > Notification highlights > Summarize notifications the menu. You’ll 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 ​​may change over time.