Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- A leaked One UI 9 build includes a new app called Driving Insights.
- Driving Insights uses AI to generate advice about your driving habits.
- One UI 9 is expected to launch this summer.
One UI 8.5 still hasn’t reached many Samsung devices, but the company’s Android 17-based One UI 9 update is well into development. Earlier today, we reported that One UI 9 will bring additional home screen search options to Samsung devices. Now, we’ve seen an entirely new app that’s part of One UI 9 — and it’s kind of a strange one.
Code within leaked One UI 9 builds has given us a peek at an in-progress app for Samsung devices called Driving Insights. The app tracks your precise location, using AI to give you feedback about your perceived driving patterns, generating weekly, personalized summaries.
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An early version of the Driving Insights app says it’ll help you “See your habits and patterns at a glance” to “help you build better driving habits.” Using the sensors in your phone, One UI will be able to gauge a number aspects of your driving, like how fast you drive and how hard you brake.
It looks like the app will be configurable to start when your phone connects to your car’s Bluetooth. When looking back on your drives, there are options to filter by time and distance.
Weekly reports will provide feedback about your habits. A few examples we’ve seen include:
- This week, you drove in a defensive style. Steady and cautious—keep it up!
- This week, your driving had a dynamic pattern. Try to keep speed and steering smooth for consistency.
- This week, you did a lot of long-distance driving. Make sure to watch out for drowsy driving and take breaks every now and then.
- This week, your driving was practical and balanced. Good balance of safety and efficiency.
- This week, your driving showed a spirited style. Keep an eye on smooth acceleration and braking for even safer trips.
These reports will apparently be delivered in Samsung’s Now Brief.
Strings in the app’s code also point to it being able to judge how quickly you accelerate and how sharply you turn:
Code
<string name="trip_detail_about_rapid_heading">Rapid acceleration and Sudden deceleration</string>Code
<string name="trip_detail_about_rapid_bullet_imperial">Recorded when you speed up or slow down by 18.6 mph within 3 seconds.</string>Code
<string name="trip_detail_about_sharp_bullet">Turns lasting for 1.5 seconds or longer at a sharp angle. At faster speeds, wider turns will also be counted.</string>Code
<string name="trip_detail_about_sharp_heading">Sharp turns</string>We were even able to see the in-progress app in action. The screenshots below show Driving Insights’ onboarding flow, required permissions, settings, and trip history.
Driving Insights seems like a novel use for AI, with on-device processing crunching data collected by your phone to give feedback. It remains to be seen how useful any of this will be in practice, though; relying on AI for advice about a process with as much potential for harm as driving a car seems like a pretty dubious proposition.
AI’s general tendency toward agreeableness with the user might also be an issue here. The last of the sample reports listed above mentions “a spirited style” of driving, which, taken with the same report’s advice to focus on smooth acceleration and braking, certainly reads as a gentle euphemism for driving recklessly.
One UI 9 is expected to debut on Samsung’s next-gen foldables this summer.
⚠️ 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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