iOS 18.1 Brings a Surprise Apple Intelligence Update to Your Apple Card and More

iOS 18.1 is coming soon, and with it, the first set of Apple Intelligence features. I recently discovered that one of the best new AI features in iOS 18.1, Notification Summaries, could be a smart and useful addition to Apple Card and related apps for tracking expenses or income. Here's how to do it.

Notification Summaries Coming in iOS 18.1

Notification Summaries are an additional Apple Intelligence feature in iOS 18.1. When you enable this feature, your notifications will be augmented with artificial intelligence to provide more informative content.

For example, when you receive email notifications, you'll get a summary of the full content of the email, rather than just a snippet of the first few lines.

I especially like using notification summaries for the Messages and Mail apps. Apple Intelligence provides the key information I need better than unsummarized notifications.

But I just discovered another really handy use case: Apple Card spending summaries.

Apple Intelligence automatically totals your expenses or income

One of the benefits of using summaries is that they can summarize the content of multiple notifications at once. So if you have a stack of notifications from one app, Apple Intelligence will synthesize the content of all the individual notifications into one short summary.

Here's the kicker: For Wallet app notifications, Apple Intelligence automatically calculates the total of your recent spending from all the notifications in the stack.

For example, my wife and I just went to Walt Disney World and made a few purchases there using our Apple Card. Apple Intelligence took the amounts from my three Wallet notifications and tallied them up for the Notification Summary.

So my three separate notifications for spending $13.83, $7.44, and $13.62 became one handy summary:

Multiple purchases at Walt Disney World and elsewhere totaling $34.89

The nice thing is that this isn't limited to Apple Card in iOS 18.1.

Any app that sends notifications with dollar amounts will be tallied up for the Notification Summary. This goes for other apps that track your spending, too, or even apps like Venmo that show you payments you've received.

It's easy to manually calculate these numbers yourself, but it's much nicer to have them calculated automatically by Apple Intelligence. And it helps you be more aware of your recent expenses or income on any given day.

Are you excited about this new AI feature? What could you use it for? Let us know in the comments.