Let’s be clear: I don’t mind the Apple Intelligence-powered summaries that appear on my iPhone’s lock screen. It’s simply that the feature isn’t very good yet.

These AI notification summaries, which Apple launched with iOS 18, are intended to give a fast way to review crucial information from your apps. If you receive several notifications from an app such as Apple News, notification summaries provide a summary of all your alerts in a brief line or two, saving you from having to read each individual notice.

These summaries, however, generate some extremely ridiculous and erroneous stuff. As a result, Apple made a few improvements to the AI function in iOS 18.3.

With iOS 18.3, you will

Notice that all notification summaries are italicized, allowing you to readily recognize them as AI summaries rather than genuine news headlines. Another significant modification to notification summaries is that the feature has been temporarily disabled in all news applications, including Apple News and CNET, due to badly described headlines. Finally, you can quickly disable notification summaries for a certain app from your lock screen if you don’t want to fully stop the function but are dissatisfied with how it works with some apps.

Regardless of how you feel about notification summaries, you should know how to disable the function. Even with the most recent improvements, you might not be satisfied with how notification summaries operate, so here’s what you need.

to know.

Read more: iOS 18.3 is here. Change These 8 iPhone Settings First.

 

Watch now: How Apple Intelligence Works in iOS 18.1 (07:53).
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The notification summary function in Apple Intelligence employs AI to “intelligently” summarize your alerts, allowing you to rapidly read critical facts from your busiest applications. While the tool works well for condensing large emails into concise points, it does not always make sense for text messages.

Apple Intelligence may sometimes be overly literal.

The other day, I received

Several text messages stating how horrible a trek was and how the individual felt “dead” (tired) afterwards, as well as some other vague facts. This is how Apple Intelligence described these few signals for me:

A snapshot of an iPhone notification with a message that says Hiking is exceedingly tough, almost lethal.
That’s hardly the best way to start the day.
This book describes how a trainer “killed” my friend with a particularly difficult session.

SMS notification summary
Did the trainer murder my friend? Or the other way around?
Apple Intelligence, particularly the notification summaries function, struggles with sarcasm, exaggeration, humor, and slang. And this is an issue, particularly given how informal text messaging can be.

There’s even a forum dedicated to bad notification descriptions sent by Apple Intelligence. It accepts everything at face value, which might result in some scary, wrong, or simply frustrating summaries for texts.

How to disable notification summaries for text messages

Instead than being stressed every time a distressing summary shows, I turned off notification summaries for text messages. If you wish to do the same, it is simple:

Launch the Settings app.
Go to Notifications > Summary Previews.
To turn off Messages on iOS 18.1, follow this snapshot of the Notifications settings. Summarize message previews.
You may turn off notification summaries for any app on your iPhone.
Instead of obtaining concise summaries of multiple texts

You’ll see each individual text message on your lock screen or notification center, as usual. You may stop notification summaries for all applications on your phone (turn off Summarize Previews), however as I previously stated, it works great for emails and third-party apps.

You may now disable notification summaries from your lock screen.

As long as you’re running iOS 18.3, you may deactivate notification summaries for individual apps directly from your lock screen, without having to go into settings. If you’re dissatisfied with how the notification summaries feature summarizes a certain app, just slide left on the notification summary on your lock screen, select Options, and then Turn Off “App” Summaries.

iOS 18.3 notificationssummaries
Notification summaries are italicized in iOS 18.3.
Nelson Aguilar / CNET
This will turn off notification summaries for only that app, whether it’s X, Amazon, or Gmail.