With the iOS 18.3 update, Apple made several changes to the Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries feature that aggregates incoming notifications into a single quick-access message.
For now, Notification Summaries for the News and Entertainment category have been temporarily disabled, and Apple is working on improvements. Notification Summaries for news will return in a future software update.
In the Settings app, when a user activates Notification Summaries, Apple has added a warning that this is a beta feature and that there could be errors.
For summaries that are still available through Apple Intelligence, the text is now italicized as a way to distinguish them from traditional notifications.
There is also now an option to manage whether notifications are summarized for an app right from the Lock Screen. To turn off summaries from the Lock Screen, swipe to the left on a Notification Summary and then tap on options to get to the menu to disable it on a per-app basis.
Apple is making changes to Notification Summaries following complaints that the way Apple Intelligence aggregated news notifications could lead to false headlines and confused customers. Several BBC notifications, for example, were improperly summarized, providing false information to readers.
After BBC News complained, Apple said that it would update Apple Intelligence to cut down on confusion caused by inaccurate summaries. Apple said that a future software update would clarify when notifications were summarized by Apple Intelligence.
Available on compatible devices in iOS 18.1 and later, Apple Intelligence notification summaries are designed to group multiple notifications from the same app together, providing a one-sentence overview of the content. These short summaries can cause problems when AI pulls the wrong details from news stories.
While summaries have been disabled for news for the time being, the feature is still available for other types of apps. Notification Summaries can be turned off entirely in the Notifications section of the Settings app.
