As someone who is inundated with emails and messages throughout the day, one of the Apple Intelligence features I was most cautiously optimistic about was Notification Summaries. The feature aims to make sorting through the pings on your Lock Screen a neater, faster experience, by grouping multiple notifications from the same app together and quickly summarizing the lot. Unfortunately, it seems the feature isn’t quite ready yet, seeing as the BBC complained to Apple that Notification Summaries made up false headlines for its news stories. Now, with iOS 18.3 beta 3, Apple is rolling back how involved the feature is, and is making it easier to opt out of entirely.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
No AI summaries for news apps
Perhaps it’s a response to reporting like the BBC’s, or perhaps it’s a coincidence, but the biggest change to Notification Summaries in the latest iOS 18.3 beta is that they’re being paused for news and entertainment apps. If you try to enable notification summaries for a news app, iOS will tell you the setting is “temporarily unavailable,” although you can still turn it on to start receiving summaries when they’re re-enabled.
Given that Notification Summaries had previously sent users what looked like an official BBC alert that United Healthcare shooting suspect Luigi Mangione had shot himself when the paper only mentioned an “angry outburst,” 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,” where it had previously only said “summary accuracy may vary based on content.” Both are technically true, although the former’s a bit more direct.
To that end, when you’re setting up Notification Summaries for the first time, Apple will also now tell you, “This beta feature will occasionally make mistakes that could misrepresent the meaning of the original content.” Yes, even the version of Notification Summaries present in the current public iOS build is considered a beta.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
AI-written notifications will look different
This really should have been there at launch. In order to indicate when a notification is an AI-written summary rather than an original, Notification Summaries will now be written in italics. Previously, the only real indication when a notification was a summary was a small icon to the left of the summary showing that multiple notifications were being summarized and grouped together.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
You can disable any app’s Notification Summaries from the notification banner
Previously, the only way to disable Notification Summaries once you had set it up was to dive into the Settings app, where you could either disable the feature altogether or on an app-by-app basis. In the beta, you can now instead turn off Notification Summaries by swiping down from the top of your Home Screen and looking at your notification banners, but only on a per-app basis.
To do this, swipe left on any app’s notification banner, tap Options, then select Turn off [app name] Summaries. You can also rate a summary’s accuracy from this menu, by giving it either a thumbs up or thumbs down.
On the off chance that you do want to try Notification Summaries but didn’t enable them when first setting up Apple Intelligence, you can do so under Settings > Notifications > Summarize Notifications.
How to Install iOS 18.3 beta 3
While the updated Notification Summaries feature will make its way to all compatible iPhones with iOS 18.3’s final release, you can try it out right now. To install the current iOS 18.3 beta, first ensure you have a compatible phone, then double-check that you’ve enrolled your iPhone into Apple’s beta program at beta.apple.com. From here, simply open your iPhone and navigate to Settings > General > Software Update > Beta Updates. If you’re also enrolled in the developer beta program (you don’t need to be in this instance), you’ll be able to choose between iOS 18 Developer Beta or iOS 18 Public Beta here, but either will work if you only see one. Make your selection, then tap Back and download iOS 18.3 Beta 3 when it pops up on your screen.
Note that beta releases tend to be buggier than final builds, so download this update to your main device at your own risk.
