iOS 18.3 Changes How AI Notification Summaries Work on Your iPhone. Here's What You Need to Know

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Let’s get this up front: I don’t hate the Apple Intelligence-powered summaries that pop up on my iPhone’s lock screen. It’s just that the feature isn’t all that good yet.

These AI notification summaries, which Apple introduced with iOS 18, are supposed to provide 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. And because of that, Apple has made a few changes to the AI feature with the release of iOS 18.3.

In iOS 18.3, you’ll now notice that all notification summaries are italicized, so that you can quickly and easily identify them as AI-summaries, and not actual news headlines. Another big change to notification summaries is that the feature is temporarily disabled for all news apps, including Apple News and CNET, because of poorly summarized headlines. And lastly, you can now easily disable notification summaries for a specific app, straight from your lock screen, in case you don’t want to completely disable the feature but you’re not happy with how it works with certain apps.

However you feel about notification summaries, it’s important to know how you can disable the feature. Even with the latest updates, you might still not be happy with how notification summaries work, so here’s what you need to know.

Read more: iOS 18.3 Is Here: Change These 8 iPhone Settings First

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 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:

a screenshot of an iPhone notification showing a message that reads Hike extremely difficult, almost fatal

Not the greatest message to wake up to.

Nelson Aguilar/CNET

This is a text about how a trainer “killed” my friend with a particular tough workout.

notification summary for a text message

The trainer killed my friend? Or the other way round?

Nelson Aguilar/CNET

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:

  1. Launch the Settings application
  2. Go to Notifications > Summarize Previews
  3. Toggle off Messages

a screenshot of the Notifications settings in iOS 18.1, showing how to turn off Summarize Previews for Messages

You can disable notification summaries for any app on your iPhone.

Nelson Aguilar/CNET

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.

You can now turn off notification summaries from your lock screen

As long as you’re on iOS 18.3, you can disable notification summaries on a per-app basis straight from your lock screen, without having to go into your settings. If you’re unhappy with how the notification summaries feature is summarizing for a certain app, simply swipe left on the notification summary on your lock screen, hit Options and then tap on Turn Off “App” Summaries.

iOS 18.3 notification summaries

You can see that notification summaries are italicized on iOS 18.3

Nelson Aguilar/CNET

This will disable notification summaries for that app only, whether it’s X, Amazon or Gmail.



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