After trying almost all the AI features different brands offer on their phones, Galaxy AI seems a step ahead. Apart from some flashier features, such as Circle to Search, Live Translate, and the photo editing stuff, there are some features that are actually meant to make your day-to-day smartphone usage experience easier. Samsung even copied Google Pixel’s best feature and gave it their own twist. Take Notification Highlights, for instance. It is one of those Galaxy AI features that saves me time every single day.
Two features hiding under one confusing name
Notification Highlights isn’t one feature
Notification Highlights is a setting that is buried in a menu most people will never stumble on. That’s regrettable, because it’s a genuinely useful feature. Notably, Notification Highlights isn’t a single feature but two, bundled together under a single Highlights AI settings page.
This feature is currently exclusive to the Samsung Galaxy S26 series and not available on older models. You can access Notification Highlights by heading over to Settings > Notifications > Notification highlights. Under it, you will find options such as Prioritize Notifications and Summarize Notifications.
Prioritize Notifications is a feature that scans which apps you open first and which alerts you actually interact with versus the ones you swipe away. Then it reorders your notification panel and ensures that the notifications that you care about appear on top. Prioritize Notifications analyzes your notification content and usage patterns entirely on-device and then figures out what is important to you.
On the other hand, the Summarize Notifications feature is what condenses long messages into a short message you can read without opening the app. This comes in handy when you’re in a WhatsApp group that won’t stop buzzing. With the Summarize Notifications feature, you get to know the gist in a couple of sentences instead of scrolling through forty messages.
It feels different than any other Galaxy AI features
It works on device, not in the cloud
When you use any of the Galaxy AI features that involve generative stuff such as Photo Assist, Chat Assist, and others, your data is sent off to a server somewhere. You can manually force it to process everything locally, though. However, Notification Highlights doesn’t have that problem. All the analysis for both prioritizing and summarizing notifications happens locally on your phone.
Most Galaxy AI tools want you to open an app, type a prompt, or wait for a suggestion pop-up to get the results. This one works differently. You set it once and forget about it. It is designed in such a way that the most important notifications that you often interact with get your attention first rather than getting lost in a crowd of notifications.
But frankly, I don’t want to oversell this because it’s not flawless. Samsung’s support page says that summaries may not always be accurate. For this reason, you should treat them as a quick preview and actually tap on the notification to read the context for anything important. They’re also built from your unread notifications, and they may not appear when your device’s battery is low or power-saving mode is on.
In addition, summarize notifications only works with a specific list of messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Google Messages, Instagram, TikTok, and a few dozen others. If you’re chatting somewhere niche, don’t expect a summary to show up. Prioritize notifications is also limited to alerts in your phone’s system language.
Should you also use it?
If you are a person who picks up a phone with a wall of notifications and is confused about whom to say yes to or pay attention to, Notifications Highlights is for you. Keep in mind that you may need to spend some time with it in order to get the hang of it, and let it understand your pattern. It is just doing a small, boring job, which honestly might be the best use case for AI for someone who needs it.
And that’s the part that’s stuck with me. For once, a Galaxy AI feature isn’t trying to impress me. If Notification highlights have also left you impressed, then it is a perfect example of why many people pick Galaxy AI over Gemini. You can also check which Galaxy AI features one writer needs every day. And if you are on the other side of the fence and don’t like AI on your Galaxy phone, you can turn them off in 4 simple steps.