How to Turn Off Apple Intelligence Notification Summary on Your IPhone
So you’ve finally received the Apple Intelligence update for iOS 18.1, completed the waitlist, and enabled the Notification Summary feature when you signed up. It’s natural: you’re curious, and it’s easy to do. And, Apple says, you can turn it off and configure it later in Settings.
Well, later now. If you’ve been using notification summaries for a while, you may be scratching your head over their usefulness. The new Apple AI feature uses local LLMs to automatically combine multiple messages from a single or group chat into one concise sentence. It can also do this for long iMessage and email threads.
But his resume is not always correct. In my experience, sometimes they can be very distant. If you find this feature more annoying than useful, here’s how you can easily disable it for all apps or, alternatively, just the Messages or Mail app.
How to disable and customize notification summary
As with many Apple Intelligence features, notification summary has an option to turn it off. Go to Settings > Notifications > Summarize Previews and turn off Summarize Previews from the top.
Additionally, you can also disable the preview summarization feature on a per-app basis. On the Preview Overview screen itself, you’ll see a list of all installed apps that can send you notifications. Here, scroll down and tap the switch next to the app you want to turn off summaries for. Now all notifications from this application will be displayed the same as before.
To summarize or not to summarize?
After a couple of weeks of testing and public release, the outcome of the AI notifications is still undecided. If you’re willing to keep an eye on this feature and not believe everything it tells you ( usually a great policy in all things AI ), you can get a lot of use out of it. Especially if you regularly encounter a lot of WhatsApp and iMessage threads from work or group chats.
Personally, I haven’t seen any benefit in this, at least not yet. Yes, Apple Intelligence can give me the gist of a long-winded message, and that sounds useful, but I still always check the message myself to make sure it’s spelled correctly. However, I found it useful in getting an accurate summary of the multiple transactions I made that day and what my bank balance was at the end.
Online, people have reported instances of Apple’s LLM completely misinterpreting messages or delivering bad breakup news in clearly insensitive language . Hopefully, as these models evolve, they will get better. And if you’re inundated with countless identical or similar messages, I understand that notification summaries can be quite useful.