Samsung Now Brief went from borderline useless to something I actually use every day

I’ll be honest, when Samsung introduced Now Brief with the Galaxy S25 series (One UI 8.0) last year, I thought it could be useful based on what the company promised. However, it turned out to be one of those AI-powered features I tried for a few days and then forgot existed.

At launch, my colleague Mihai explained how Now Brief felt borderline useless. It mostly showed weather updates, calendar appointments, and some odd Spotify recommendations that rarely matched what I actually listen to. Samsung positioned it as a personalized assistant of sorts, but it often felt more like a glorified widget stack.

A year later, I didn’t expect to be writing this, but Now Brief on my Galaxy S26 Ultra running One UI 8.5 has changed my opinion. It's gone from something I ignored to something I actually find myself checking. The biggest reason is that it finally feels personal, and it can surface information from many more sources.

Before a recent vacation, Now Brief surfaced my boarding passes from Samsung Wallet and reminded me about travel details a day in advance. In another instance, it picked up sports match tickets I received through WhatsApp from a ticketing service called District, which surprised me. Samsung should have offered this smart cross-app integration from day one.

Now Brief has also started doing little things that make me return to it.

Spotify recommendations are actually relevant now. It displays playlists featuring my favorite artists and genres. It also shows new YouTube videos from channels I follow. Now Brief pulls in updates from my Samsung home appliances, displaying how much electricity they consumed. It also surfaces relevant news articles from Samsung News and shows memories from photos and videos I captured that day or week.

These things may seem minor individually, but together they make the feature feel more personal.

I’ve also grown to like the wellness side of it. Seeing daily activity metrics, workout stats, and weekly screen time summaries in one place is useful and reduces the number of apps I need to open. Birthday reminders pulled from Samsung Calendar may not be groundbreaking, but they are surprisingly useful, especially since Now Brief can even generate birthday greeting cards.

It even reminded me to call my mom after I hadn’t spoken to her in two weeks. That was one of the moments when Now Brief stopped feeling like a gimmick.

I now find myself opening it manually two or three times a day, which is something I never imagined doing last year. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.

The Read Aloud feature still sounds extremely robotic and unnatural, even though text-to-speech (TTS) models have improved so much over the past few years. It almost feels like Samsung forgot to update its TTS engine. And I really wish Samsung would add sports integrations. Let Now Brief show live scores or remind me when my favorite team is playing.

Samsung doesn't often take a feature that flopped at launch and turn it into something people actually use daily. Now Brief is one of the rare cases where that happened, and it deserves credit for it.

Now Brief started out as one of the more forgettable Galaxy AI experiments. A year and a half later, it's one of the more useful things on my phone.