The feature I dislike the most about Apple Intelligence has to be the AI-powered notification summaries.
These notification summaries are supposed to provide you with a quick way to glance at important information from your apps. If you have multiple notifications from an app like Apple News, the notification summaries feature recaps all your notifications into a short sentence or two, so that you don’t have to read each individual notification you’ve received.
These summaries, however, produce some truly absurd and inaccurate content. It’s gotten so bad that Apple has paused these AI-generated notification summaries as part of the latest iOS 18.3 beta released on Thursday.
However, if you’re on iOS 18.2, you still have these summaries on by default. However, if you’re as unhappy with them as I’ve been, there is a way to disable notification summaries. Here’s how.
Read more: How to Get Apple Intelligence on Your iPhone
Watch this: Apple’s Monster iPhone Update: How Apple Intelligence Works on iOS 18.1
I know Apple Intelligence is trying to help, but…
The new notification summary feature on Apple Intelligence uses AI to “intelligently” summarize your notifications, so you can quickly scan through key details from your busiest apps. And while the feature works pretty well for summarizing long emails into succinct points, it doesn’t always make sense with text messages.
Apple Intelligence takes things too literally sometimes.
The other day, I received several text messages about how bad a hike was and how that person felt “dead” (tired) after, along with some other sparse details. This is how Apple Intelligence summarized those few messages for me:
Not the greatest message to wake up to.
This is a text about how a trainer “killed” my friend with a particular tough workout.
The trainer killed my friend? Or the other way round?
Apple Intelligence, and more specifically the notification summaries feature, just doesn’t do well with sarcasm, exaggerations, jokes and slang. And that’s a problem, especially with how informal text messaging can be. There’s even a subreddit with a ton of terrible notification summaries that people have received from Apple Intelligence. It takes everything at face value, which can lead to some pretty horrifying, incorrect or simply annoying summaries for text messages.
How to turn off notification summaries for text messages
Instead of stressing each time a disturbing summary appears, I disabled notification summaries for text messages. If you want to do the same, it’s easy:
- Launch the Settings application
- Go to Notifications > Summarize Previews
- Toggle off Messages
You can disable notification summaries for any app on your iPhone.
In place of receiving condensed summaries of multiple text messages, you’ll see every individual text message on your lock screen or notification center like usual. You could completely disable notification summaries (turn off Summarize Previews) for every single app on your phone, but as I mentioned earlier, it works pretty well for emails and third-party apps.
For now, it’s doing a really great job with text messages. See Siri? That’s sarcasm.
