Hadlee Simons / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Samsung Now Brief in One UI 8 can recommend Spotify playlists and YouTube videos.
- In One UI 8.5, those Spotify suggestions should include more seasonal and time-of-day playlists.
- YouTube recommendations are finally becoming personalized if you share your data with Now Brief.
We first got access to both the Now Bar and Now Brief with the release of the Galaxy S25 and One UI 8 earlier this year. Beyond giving you a summary of your day, and access to a little news, the Now Brief has also dipped its toe in media recommendations, pointing you to Spotify playlists you might enjoy, or YouTube clips worth checking out. And now as we’ve been digging through early One UI 8.5 leaks, we’ve identified some ways those should be getting even better.
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Let’s start with YouTube, as that’s been a particular pain point for many Now Brief users. Comments on Samsung’s community forums have complained about a seeming lack of personalization to YouTube clips highlighted by Now Brief — sure, you might still like them, but they haven’t felt super targeted. Well, it looks like Samsung’s working to fix that:
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We found some videos on YouTube from sports teams you may be interested in.
We found some YouTube videos about %s for your upcoming trip.
We found some YouTube videos that you might like.
Get richer insights
Share your personal data with partner to get more personalized contents such as your interest YouTube contents in your Now brief. Not only do we find text strings that show Now Brief communicating that its YouTube recommendations are based on the user’s likes, but we also have these strings from where the app will request permission to track your likes in the first place.
But it’s not just YouTube that’s getting better in Now Brief; we’ve also uncovered some evidence for the ways Spotify recommendations should be improving, too:
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Liven up your afternoon with this playlist.
Enjoy this birthday playlist.
Start your week with this playlist.
Get into the Friday mood with this playlist.
Start the new year with this fresh playlist.
Wind down before bed with this playlist.
Enjoy this rainy day playlist.
Your weekend soundtrack starts here.
Enjoy this playlist for a snowy day
Look back on the songs you listened to this year with this playlist. Based on that, it looks like Now Brief will be suggesting these new playlists based on date and time — which just fits perfectly with Now Brief’s vibe.
These Now Brief finds make up the meat of our latest One UI 8.5 discoveries, but before we let you go we also wanted to share a couple other little ones that we’ve just spotted:
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Quick Share
Get recommendations for who to share photos with based on the faces detected in them. When you’re browsing photos, look forward to sharing suggestions based on the people present in them. And then Samsung’s up to more or less the same thing for contacts:
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Contacts
Get recommended relationships and profile images for contacts based on images in Gallery. If those rumors of a December 8 start to the One UI 8.5 public beta end up panning out, it shouldn’t be long at all now before we get the chance to go hands-on with these changes.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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