Ive disabled this iOS 26 Apple Intelligence feature, and you probably should too

Date:
Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:59:22 +0000

Description:
Even in iOS 26, notification summaries still get things wrong and miss important details, so here's how to turn them off.

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So far, its fair to say that Apple Intelligence hasnt been a massive success, but theres potential there and one of the features that I think has the most potential is also among the first Id turn off.

That might sound odd, but potential is the key word there, as right now this feature just isnt ready even though it rolled out back with iOS 18.1, and
has since been improved in iOS 26 .

If you havent guessed, Im talking about notification summaries, an AI tool that as the name suggests will summarize notifications. So for example if you get a long series of messages, the summary will condense them into a
brief overview of the key points, meaning that you dont necessarily have to read them immediately, or at all.

This can save you time if youre getting a lot of notifications, and help you prioritize the most important ones. Or at least it could if I could rely on it. (Image credit: Apple) Why 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 theres something important. But right now, I
find that even with notification summaries enabled, Im doing that anyway, because they dont always get things right.

In fact, soon after launch, Apple disabled summaries for news apps , because this tool made major errors in summarizing news stories.

The feature was fully enabled again with iOS 26, but while it has seemingly had some behind the scenes improvements, its still not totally reliable, with the iOS 26 version of its UI making a point to emphasize that errors may occur.

And errors do occur notifications will still sometimes be incorrectly summarized, but what more often happens in my experience is that when it attempts to summarize multiple messages or particularly long texts, it will often miss key details. So whats there might be correct, but it still wont tell me everything I need to know.

So since I cant rely on it, I just end up reading the summaries and then
still immediately reading the messages or articles anyway which takes even more time than when I just dont use notification summaries at all.

Still, I am hopeful that one day this feature will be reliable enough to, well, rely on, so Ill still turn it on again next time it gets updated, just to see if its good enough yet. But for now, these summaries spend most of their time switched off. How to turn notification summaries off (Image
credit: Future / Apple)

Thankfully, if youve previously enabled notification summaries, its easy to turn them off again, though annoyingly using the search bar in the Settings menu to search for notification summaries or summarize notifications fails to find anything.

Instead, youll want to do the following: 1. Open Settings 2. Tap
Notifications 3. Then tap Summarize Notifications 4. Then turn the Summarize Notifications toggle off Pro tip: customize the feature instead

Personally, I tend to keep notification summaries fully disabled other than when I want to test them again with new versions of iOS. But another option
is to customize them so that only certain types of notifications get summarized.

So you might for example choose not to summarize news apps or anything else where accuracy is super important, but allow the feature to summarize social media posts and content from other apps.

But you can get as granular as you want, toggling the feature on or off for specific apps. To do this: 1. Open Settings 2. Tap Notifications 3. Then tap Summarize Notifications

On that screen, youll see the toggle to turn notification summaries off, but underneath that, there are also toggles for individual apps so you can just enable or disable it for specific apps. (Image credit: Apple)

Alternatively, the first time you turn notification summaries on or after turning it off and then on again youll be presented with three tick boxes, letting you select app categories that you want to summarize notifications
for the options being News & Entertainment, Communication & Social, and All Other Apps.

So if you just want to enable or disable it for one or more of those categories, thats a faster approach than ticking and unticking individual apps.

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/ive-disabled-this-ios-26-apple-intelli gence-feature-and-you-probably-should-too


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