Apple temporarily limits notification summaries in iOS 18.3 update — here's why

Apple has been slowly releasing and tweaking Apple Intelligence features with each new iteration of iOS 18. The public release of iOS 18.3 should be no different.

The iOS 18.3 beta launched a week ago and we expect the public version to drop next week, likely on January 27 or 28, which aligns with Apple's preference for releasing updates on Monday or Tuesday.

iOS 18.3 will bring a number of changes including new Camera Control features, bug fixes and importantly, AI changes including temporarily removing an Apple Intelligence feature.

When the first version of Apple Intelligence launched in October, one of the highlight AI tools was notification summaries for various apps. The tool would send you a summary of notifications including news and prioritizing urgent alerts and pushing lesser ones down to be summarized later.

Unfortunately, that tool, especially when it came to real news, was found to produced shockingly bad headlines in December. Mere weeks later in January, it was again caught producing alarmingly error-filled headlines, including one about Rafael Nadal.

Apple announced that it would make changes to the feature in early January, with updates expected to roll out in the "coming weeks." The feature was disabled in the iOS 18.3 beta.

A number of updates are coming to notification summaries while it's temporarily disabled. These include (from 9to5 Mac):

• Disabling summaries for specific apps from the notification ('Options' and then 'Turn off Summaries' from the notification screen)
• Italicizing AI created text so that it's clear where the summary came from
• Language warning that the feature is in
• Temporarily disabling summaries from certain apps

Specific apps that are no longer receiving summaries include News and entertainment apps. We're sure Apple will reenable summaries for those apps in a future update, assuming the headlines errors are resolved.

You can check which apps are temporarily disabled from summary notifications by going to Settings — Notifications — Summarize Notifications. Affected apps will have 'Temporarily Disabled' listed underneath them, not the toggles. Apps we've checked on our phones include:

• News
• Music
• YouTube
• Reddit
• Netflix
• Max
• Disney+
• Most streaming apps

Apple highlighting when you are seeing an AI summary with UI changes, is a good thing, however that doesn't solve accuracy issues.

How Apple changes its model to accurately summarize the news will determine if the feature is viable in the future. Or, it could just share the headline from the original news source, just a suggestion.

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