Google Play Store adds AI summaries for reviews

Google’s Play Store has undergone significant evolution since the company increased its involvement in AI. With its focus on AI, the Play Store is introducing an AI summaries feature for reviews in a limited capacity.

Just below the ‘Ratings and reviews’ section at the bottom of an app listing, a summary titled ‘Users are saying’ appears. This three- to four-sentence summary highlights both positive and negative user feedback and concludes with a “Summarized by Google AI” note.

For those who use apps like Amazon, these additions aren’t exactly groundbreaking, but they also offer a handy AI-based summary of reviews within product listings. According to Android Authority, the App Store for iPhones also picked up this capability earlier this year.

This update not only provides an AI-generated summary of app reviews but also introduces new filters, or ‘chips,’ to categorize reviews by specific app features or issues. For example, as illustrated in the screenshots, an application like Google Docs would display chips to organize reviews based on topics such as feature availability, user interface, and app stability.

While the addition of chips for filtering reviews by specific app features or aspects is appreciated, there are ongoing concerns about AI’s ability to fully and accurately capture user issues.

Google Play Store has offered ‘App highlights’ since last year, in addition to offering AI summaries of reviews for apps and games. Moreover, the Q&A feature introduced earlier this year would let users chat with Gemini for more details about an app, although it’s still not widely available.

Since Google is working on integrating Gemini capabilities for the Play Store, we don’t see the company stopping with the new features.