I thought Samsung's Galaxy AI Call Brief feature doesn't work, until it did

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Galaxy Z Flip 8 launched with One UI 9, which brings several new AI features. My FanCam appears to have garnered the most interest, while the one that seems to have flown under the radar is Call Brief.

A new addition to Galaxy AI's Call Assist suite of functions, Call Brief — according to Samsung — can display contextual information and related events on the call screen.

The idea appears to be that the phone will surface relevant information while you are talking to someone, saving you from having to leave the call screen and search for it manually.

That sounds useful, but Samsung doesn't explain what it means by contextual information. It doesn't provide examples, tell you what information Call Brief looks for, or explain what conditions must be met before something appears.

When I started using the Galaxy Z Fold 8, turning on Call Brief — you can do that from Settings > Galaxy AI > Call assist > Call brief — was one of the first things I did. I called several people after enabling it and many more in the weeks that followed, but it never displayed anything.

There was no contextual information, related event, or any other indication that the feature was active. Since Samsung hadn't explained what I should expect to see, I eventually assumed Call Brief simply wasn't working.

But then that changed.

I learned through social media that Call Brief can display the other person's local time and location when you call an international number. Since I don't call anyone outside my country, this was something I had never seen on my phone.

However, it prompted me to call myself from another phone using my secondary number to see whether Call Brief would finally do something.

Lo and behold, it did. As you can see in the screenshot below, Call Brief found an upcoming birthday stored in the Calendar app on both phones and displayed it as a Shared event.

That is a pretty smart use of AI, if I'm being honest. I had started wondering whether Call Brief was one of those features Samsung would make useful only several months after launch, as it did with Now Brief.

It turns out that isn't the case. My daily routine simply hadn't given Galaxy AI an opportunity to make Call Brief useful.

It also reminded me that not every Galaxy AI feature has to be useful to everyone or something we use every day. Call Brief may rarely do anything for me, but someone who regularly makes international calls or has calendar events in common with the people they call could find it genuinely useful.

Still, Samsung could do a much better job of explaining what the feature can show and what makes it spring into action. Had I not learned about its international-call trick and performed this unusual test, I might have continued thinking Call Brief didn't work at all.

At the very least, Samsung should list some examples on the Call Brief settings screen. Mentioning local time, location, and shared calendar events would have saved me weeks of wondering whether the feature did anything.

Call Brief doesn't need to appear during every call, but Samsung does need to tell us when it does and when it doesn't.