Let’s start here: I don’t hate the Apple Intelligence-powered summaries that pop up on my iPhone’s lock screen. It’s just that it doesn’t feel like the feature is quite baked through yet.
Apple introduced AI summaries in iOS 18, and they’re designed to give you a glanceable recap of your notifications when you have more than one from the same app. Instead of reading through four or five individual notifications, you’ll get one or two sentences that summarizes your notifications. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, it’s a mixed bag.
When Apple Intelligence attempts to summarize notifications, it can yield not so intelligent results that are way off the mark. Luckily, Apple was quick enough to tweak the feature with the release of iOS 18.3, but the feature is still not quite there yet. Still, you’ll now notice that all notification summaries are italicized, so that you can quickly and easily identify them as AI-summaries.
Another big change to notification summaries is that the feature is temporarily disabled for all news apps, including Apple News and CNET, because of poorly summarized headlines. Lastly, you can now easily disable notification summaries for a specific app from your lock screen, in case you don’t want to completely disable the feature, but you’re not happy with how it works with certain apps.
Even with the latest updates, you still might not be satisfied with how notification summaries work, so here’s what you need to know about turning them off. And it’s something to note that iOS 18.4 is out now with no updates to the feature. If you want to take a break from these AI summaries until Apple works the kinks out further, we’ll show you how to disable them completely.
Read more: How to turn off all or part of Apple Intelligence
Watch this: Apple’s Monster iPhone Update: How Apple Intelligence Works on iOS 18.1
I know Apple Intelligence is trying to help, but…
The 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:
Not the greatest message to wake up to.
This is a text about how a trainer “killed” my friend with a particular tough workout.
The trainer killed my friend? Or the other way round?
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:
- Launch the Settings application
- Go to Notifications > Summarize Previews
- Toggle off Messages
You can disable notification summaries for any app on your iPhone.
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.
You can now turn off notification summaries from your lock screen
As long as you’re on iOS 18.3, you can disable notification summaries on a per-app basis straight from your lock screen, without having to go into your settings. If you’re unhappy with how the notification summaries feature is summarizing for a certain app, simply swipe left on the notification summary on your lock screen, hit Options and then tap on Turn Off “App” Summaries.
You can see that notification summaries are italicized on iOS 18.3.
This will disable notification summaries for that app only, whether it’s X, Amazon or Gmail.