Amongst the entire Apple Intelligence options introduced at WWDC24 final summer time, notification summaries are seemingly one of many extra controversial ones. Customers have observed various inaccurate summaries, which has resulted in Apple tweaking the design of notification summaries, in addition to disabling it for information tales.
Whereas these summaries won’t ever be completely good, there’s a technique Apple might enhance the standard and accuracy of them, and I’d wish to see them take this concept into consideration for iOS 19.
How Notification Summaries work
Notification summaries intention that can assist you learn via your notifications quicker. It really works by studying via each notification in a notification stack, and summarizing it, all on system. That sounds nice in idea, however Apple’s implementation has one deadly flaw:
Apple Intelligence can solely summarize whats really introduced in a notification. That will sound like a “nicely, duh” assertion, however hear me out.
Quite a lot of the time, notifications are already written to be temporary, that means its straightforward for customers to learn inside a small notification bubble. The mannequin already must be sufficiently small to run domestically on a chip as sluggish as an A17 Professional, so ideally, you received’t need to depart a variety of room for guessing.
We are able to already see an instance of this at work. Within the Mail app, the summaries are primarily based on the contents of all the e-mail, and are much more truthful than what can seem in Notification Middle.
Summaries at the moment lack context
Group chats on iMessage have reply threads, so it’s straightforward for somebody to concurrently talk about one thing else in a busy chat. That’s nice, however Apple Intelligence has no means of understanding that context. This typically leads to differing particulars all merging into one inaccurate abstract.
The mannequin is summarizing already-short notifications within the order they seem, and that isn’t an ideal strategy a variety of the time.
That leads me to my suggestion: permit builders to offer extra background context to Apple’s on system mannequin. With my instance of iMessage, Apple might give the mannequin context of what a brand new textual content is in response to.
What I’d wish to see Apple do
If apps might present extra background context to Apple’s mannequin, many abstract inaccuracies may very well be alleviated. This background context would in any other case be invisible to customers, nevertheless it’d assist information Apple’s fashions.
Again in December, Apple Intelligence inaccurately summarized a BBC Information story concerning Luigi Mangione. It was a big misrepresentation of the particular story, to say the least. Apple has since disabled notification summaries for information apps.
Nonetheless, in a world the place builders might present background context, it might be potential for the BBC, for instance, to offer the lead paragraph of a narrative. This may give Apple Intelligence extra information to work with, permitting for summaries to be extra correct.
In the end, giant language fashions will nonetheless do giant language mannequin issues, particularly with regards to a mannequin that must be sufficiently small to run on a smartphone with 8GB of RAM.
On the finish of the day, Apple wants an answer to its notification summaries drawback. It definitely cant depart information summaries disabled endlessly. Bloomberg lately reported that Apple will permit third occasion builders to work with Apple Intelligence fashions in iOS 19, which is probably an indication of whats to return.
My favourite Apple accent suggestions:
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