Apple’s latest iOS beta quietly kills AI message notifications
As someone who is inundated with emails and messages throughout the day, this was one of the features of Apple Intelligence that I liked the most cautiously optimistic about was notification summaries. The feature aims to make sorting the pings on your lock screen cleaner and faster by combining multiple notifications from the same app and quickly summarizing them. Unfortunately, the function doesn’t seem to be quite ready yet the BBC complained to Apple that Notification Summaries fabricated false headlines for its news stories. Now, with iOS 18.3 Beta 3Apple is reducing the scope of the feature and making it easier to disable it completely.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
No AI summaries for news apps
Maybe it’s a response to reporting like the BBC’s, or maybe it’s a coincidence, but the biggest change to notification summaries in the latest iOS 18.3 beta is that they’ll be paused for news and entertainment apps. When you try to turn on notification summaries for a Messages app, iOS tells you that the setting is “temporarily unavailable.” However, you can still enable them to receive summaries when they are enabled again.
Considering that Notification Summaries had previously sent users what looked like an official BBC warning that United Healthcare shooting suspect Luigi Mangione had shot himself, when the paper only referred to it as an “outburst of rage.” was, that’s probably for the best.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
More direct warnings about hallucinations
The notification summaries settings page also now blatantly tells users that “summaries may contain errors,” whereas previously it only said, “The accuracy of summaries may vary depending on the content.” Technically, both are true, although the former is a bit more direct .
To that end, when you set up notification summaries for the first time, Apple now also tells you: “This beta feature occasionally makes errors that could misrepresent the meaning of the original content.” Yes, even the version of notification summaries available in the current public iOS build exists, it is considered beta.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
AI-written notifications will look different
This should have been there at launch. To indicate that a notification is an AI-authored summary and not an original, notification summaries are now italicized. Previously, the only real indication that a notification was a summary was a small icon to the left of the summary, indicating that multiple notifications were summarized and grouped.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
You can turn off each app’s notification summaries from the notification banner
Until now this was the only way Disable notification summaries Once you had it set up, you had to dive into the Settings app, where you could disable the feature either entirely or for each app. In the beta, you can now turn off notification summaries instead by swiping down from the top of your home screen and looking at your notification banners, but only for each app.
To do this, swipe left on any app’s notification banner and tap Optionsthen select Disable (app name) summaries. You can also rate the accuracy of a summary from this menu by giving either a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
In case you want to try notification summaries but didn’t enable them during initial setup Apple IntelligenceYou can do this below Settings > Notifications > Combine notifications.
How to install iOS 18.3 Beta 3
While the updated Notification Summaries feature will be available on all compatible iPhones with the final version of iOS 18.3, you can try it out now. First install the current beta version of iOS 18.3 Make sure you have a compatible phoneand then double-check that you have registered your iPhone for Apple’s beta program beta.apple.com. From here, simply open your iPhone and navigate to Settings > General > Software Update > Beta updates. If you are also enrolled in the Developer Beta Program (You don’t have to be there in this case), you can choose between one iOS 18 developer beta or iOS 18 public beta here, but both work if you only see one. Make your selection and then tap Back and download iOS 18.3 Beta 3 when it appears on your screen.
Note that beta versions tend to be more buggy than final builds. Therefore, download this update to your main device at your own risk.
