So far, it’s fair to say that Apple Intelligence hasn’t been a huge success, but there’s potential there – and one of the features I think has the most potential is also one of the first I’d turn off.
This might sound strange, but “potential” is the operative word, because at the moment this feature just isn’t ready – even though it rolled out with iOS 18.1 and has since been improved in iOS 26.
If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about Notification Summaries, an AI tool that – as the name suggests – will summarize notifications. So, for example, if you receive a long series of messages, the summary will condense them into a brief overview of the key points, meaning you won’t necessarily need to read them immediately, if at all.
This can save you time if you receive a lot of notifications and help you prioritize the most important ones. Or at least, if I could count on him.
Why do I turn off notification summaries
I love the idea of notification summaries: they could allow me to spend less time looking at my phone, and especially less time reading endless messages in group chats, just in case there’s something important. But right now I’m finding that even with notification summaries enabled, I still do it because they don’t always get it right.
In fact, shortly after its launch, Apple disabled summaries for news apps because the tool was making major errors in summarizing news.
The feature was fully enabled again with iOS 26, but while it’s apparently had some improvements behind the scenes, it’s still not completely reliable, with the iOS 26 version of its UI making a point of pointing out that errors can occur.
And mistakes can happen: notifications are sometimes summarized poorly, but what happens most often, in my experience, is that when trying to summarize multiple messages or particularly long texts, it often misses key details. So what’s there may be correct, but it still won’t tell me everything I need to know.
So since I can’t rely on it, I end up reading the summaries and then immediately read the posts or articles anyway – which takes even more time than when I just don’t use the notification summaries.
Still, I hope that one day this feature will be reliable enough to rely on, so I’ll always re-enable it the next time it’s updated, just to see if it’s still good enough. But for now, these summaries spend most of their time turned off.
How to turn off notification summaries
Fortunately, if you’ve already enabled notification summaries, it’s easy to turn them off again, although annoyingly using the search bar in the Settings menu to search for “notification summaries” or “summarize notifications” turns up nothing.
Instead, you’ll want to do the following:
- 1. Open Settings
- 2. Press Notifications
- 3. Then press Summarize notifications
- 4. Next disable the Summarize notifications option
Pro Tip: Customize the Feature Instead
Personally, I tend to keep notification summaries turned off entirely except when I want to retest them with new versions of iOS. But another option is to customize them so that only certain types of notifications are summarized.
So, for example, you can choose not to summarize news apps or anything else where accuracy is very important, but allow the feature to summarize social media posts and content from other apps.
But you can be as specific as you want, enabling or disabling the feature for specific apps. To do this:
- 1. Open Settings
- 2. Press Notifications
- 3. Then press Summarize notifications
On this screen you’ll see the toggle for turning off notification summaries, but below that there are also toggles for individual apps – so you can just turn it on or off for specific apps.
Alternatively, the first time you enable notification summaries – or after you turn them off and then back on – three checkboxes will appear, allowing you to select the categories of apps you want to summarize notifications for – the options being ‘News & Entertainment’, ‘Communication & Social’ and ‘All Other Apps’.
So if you just want to turn it on or off for one or more of these categories, it’s a quicker approach than checking and unchecking individual apps.
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