Android may soon use AI to organize your phone’s notifications
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is developing an AI-powered “notification organizer” to automatically group your notifications into categories like promotions, news, and social.
- Expected to debut in an Android 16 quarterly release, the feature will silence and bundle alerts it identifies as a match into one of four categories.
- The feature may be a Pixel-exclusive at launch, and users will be able to exempt specific apps, ensuring important alerts are not bundled away.
Notifications offer a quick way to stay updated, but a constant barrage of them can be disruptive. While every app vies for your attention, not all of its notifications are equally important in the moment. To help you manage this influx more efficiently, Google is developing a “notification organizer” feature that uses AI to group your notifications into categories. This feature could debut in the first quarterly release of Android 16.
You’re reading an Authority Insights story. Discover Authority Insights for more exclusive reports, app teardowns, leaks, and in-depth tech coverage you won’t find anywhere else. These reports reflect developments at the time of writing. Some features or details uncovered in leaks may change before official release.
Similar to how email apps like Gmail automatically sort your inbox, Android’s upcoming “notification organizer” will apply the same principle to your notifications. The feature will use AI to analyze your incoming alerts and, when it identifies a match, will silence the notification and bundle it into one of four categories:
- Promotions: Sales, new features, and more
- News: Top stories, editorials, and more
- Social: Likes, posts, and more
- Suggested: Newsletters, recommended media, and more
I first discovered evidence of this feature late last year when it was called “bundled notifications.” Since then, a few key details have emerged. Google has renamed it to “notification organizer,” a name that more accurately describes its function. Furthermore, the feature’s description now explicitly states that it’s “AI-powered and may contain errors,” confirming our earlier suspicions about its use of artificial intelligence. If a notification is categorized, its corresponding notification channel will be updated to ensure future, similar notifications are also bundled.
The framework for the “notification organizer” is part of the open-source version of Android 16, not a proprietary component exclusive to Pixel phones. However, this doesn’t mean the feature will be available on all Android 16 devices. In fact, the core AI service that analyzes and sorts the notifications is part of the Notification Assistant service, which is contained within the Android System Intelligence app and is not included in the open-source version of the OS.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
The “enhanced notifications” setting enables the system Notification Assistant service, in this case Android System Intelligence, to process notifications.
Although the Android System Intelligence app is available on many devices, it’s possible the “notification organizer” could still be a Pixel-exclusive feature at launch. We speculate it might debut with the upcoming Pixel 10 series and roll out to older models in a future Pixel Drop. This remains uncertain, especially since it’s unclear if the feature will rely on a powerful on-device model like Gemini Nano, which isn’t available on all Pixel devices.
We’ve also learned exactly what kinds of notifications will be bundled into each category, moving beyond our previous guesses based on their names. Unfortunately, we still don’t have a live demonstration of the feature, as it isn’t enabled in the latest Android release. We were, however, able to manually surface its settings page on a Pixel 8 Pro running Android 16 QPR1 Beta 2 to get a glimpse of the user controls.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
This settings page reveals one final detail: you will be able to exempt specific apps from being organized. This allows important notifications to remain prominent instead of being bundled away. The ability to opt-out any app suggests the feature will apply broadly across all notifications, which reinforces why its description warns about potential AI errors — it has a lot of varied content to analyze and may occasionally miscategorize an alert.
What do you think of this “notification organizer” feature? Does it sound like a helpful feature to you? Do you plan to turn it on once it’s available? Let us know in the comments below!
