By Julie Clover
With the iOS 18.3 update, Apple made several changes to Apple Intelligence's Notification Summaries feature, which groups incoming notifications into a single message for quick access.
Notification Summaries for the News & Entertainment category are currently disabled while Apple works on improvements. Notification summaries for news will return in a future software update.
In the Settings app, when a user enables notification summaries, Apple has added a warning that this is a beta feature and that there may be bugs.
The text of the summaries, which are still available through Apple Intelligence, is now italicized to distinguish them from traditional notifications.
There is also now an option to control whether notifications are summarized for an app directly from the lock screen. To turn off summaries from the lock screen, swipe left on the notification summary, then tap the options to open the menu and turn it off for each app.
Apple is making changes to notification summaries after complaints that the way Apple Intelligence aggregates news notifications may result in false headlines and confusion for customers. For example, several BBC notifications were incorrectly summarized, providing readers with false information.
Following a complaint from BBC News, Apple said it would update Apple Intelligence to reduce confusion caused by inaccurate summaries. Apple said a future software update will clarify when notifications are summarized by Apple Intelligence.
Available on compatible devices running iOS 18.1 and later, Notification Summaries Apple Intelligence are designed to group multiple notifications from one app together, providing a one-sentence overview of the content. These short summaries can cause problems when the AI extracts incorrect data from news stories.
While summaries are currently disabled for News, the feature is still available for other types of apps. Notification summaries can be disabled entirely in the Notifications section of the Settings app.
Tag: Apple Intelligence Guide[ 65 comments ]
