Among all the AI features unveiled at WWDC24 last summer, notification summaries have emerged as one of the more debated topics. Users have reported numerous instances of incorrect summaries, prompting Apple to adjust the design of these summaries and even disable them for news articles.
While it’s unlikely these summaries will be entirely flawless, there is a straightforward method Apple could adopt to enhance their quality and precision, which I hope to see implemented in iOS 19.
Understanding Notification Summaries
The purpose of notification summaries is to enable quicker reading of your notifications. The system reviews every notification within a stack and generates a summary—all on the device. This sounds promising in principle, but Apple’s implementation has a significant drawback:
Apple’s AI can only summarize what is explicitly included in a notification. While this may seem obvious, there’s more to consider.
Many notifications are crafted to be brief for easy reading within a small notification bubble. Given that the model has to be efficient enough to operate locally on a chip like the A17 Pro, it’s essential to minimize ambiguity.
The Context Deficiency in Summaries
In iMessage group chats, reply threads allow participants to discuss various topics simultaneously. While this feature is beneficial, Apple’s AI lacks the understanding of this context. Consequently, it often leads to a blend of different details into one inaccurate summary.
The model summarizes notifications in the order they are received, which isn’t always the ideal strategy.
This leads me to a proposal: empower developers to supply additional contextual information to Apple’s device-based model. For instance, in iMessage, Apple could offer the model insights into what a new message is responding to.
Recommended Improvements for Apple
If applications could deliver extra background context to Apple’s AI, many inaccuracies in summaries could be addressed. This context, typically unnoticed by users, would help refine Apple’s models.
In December, Apple’s AI mistakenly summarized a BBC News article about Luigi Mangione, resulting in a significant distortion of the actual content. Following this, Apple disabled notification summaries for news applications.
However, in a scenario where developers could provide background context, organizations like the BBC could include the lead paragraph of a story. This additional information would offer Apple’s AI more to work with, thus enhancing summary accuracy.
Ultimately, large language models will still function as expected, particularly one that must be compact enough to run on a smartphone with just 8GB of RAM.
Nonetheless, Apple needs to devise a solution for its notification summarization challenges. It cannot leave news summaries disabled indefinitely.
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