Apple Intelligence’s New Notification Summary Feature Can Be Absurdly Wrong

Apple released Apple Intelligence to the general public with iOS 18.1 last month. This latest mobile software update brings several new AI features to compatible Phone models, like writing tools to help you proofread your emails and the Clean Up tool to remove objects from your photos in seconds. 

You might be disappointed to learn that there is no AI in Siri — that’s coming later (iOS 18.2). And Visual Intelligence isn’t here yet either. And to continue with the complaints, there’s one particular AI feature on the iPhone that constantly stresses me out or just plain confuses me.

And that’s notification summaries for text messages.

Read more: How to Get Apple Intelligence on Your iPhone With iOS 18.1

Watch this: Apple’s Monster iPhone Update: How Apple Intelligence Works on iOS 18.1

07:53

I know Apple Intelligence is trying to help, but…

The new notification summary feature on Apple Intelligence uses AI to “intelligently” summarize your notifications, so you can quickly scan through key details from your busiest apps. And while the feature works pretty well for summarizing long emails into succinct points, it doesn’t always make sense with text messages.

Apple Intelligence takes things too literally sometimes.

The other day, I received several text messages about how bad a hike was and how that person felt “dead” (tired) after, along with some other sparse details. This is how Apple Intelligence summarized those few messages for me:

This is a text about how a trainer “killed” my friend with a particular tough workout.

Apple Intelligence, and more specifically the notification summaries feature, just doesn’t do well with sarcasm, exaggerations, jokes and slang. And that’s a problem, especially with how informal text messaging can be. There’s even a subreddit with a ton of terrible notification summaries that people have received from Apple Intelligence. It takes everything at face value, which can lead to some pretty horrifying, incorrect or simply annoying summaries for text messages.

How to turn off notification summaries for text messages

Instead of stressing each time a disturbing summary appears, I disabled notification summaries for text messages. If you want to do the same, it’s easy:

1. Launch the Settings application
2. Go to Notifications > Summarize Previews
3. Toggle off Messages

In place of receiving condensed summaries of multiple text messages, you’ll see every individual text message on your lock screen or notification center like usual. You could completely disable notification summaries (turn off Summarize Previews) for every single app on your phone, but as I mentioned earlier, it works pretty well for emails and third-party apps.

For now, it’s doing a really great job with text messages. See Siri? That’s sarcasm.