Apple Intelligence Summaries Are a Mess

  • January 7, 2025
Ai

Jason Snell over at Six Colors takes Apple to task over the current state of their Apple Intelligence notification summaries. He’s 100% right. They are bad, especially when summarizing news, and that’s unacceptable even with the “beta” tag.

Take a look at his included example:

A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized. Perhaps a little further down the road, news notifications should be summarized based on the full text of the news article, rather than generating a secondhand machine summary of a story already summarized by a human headline writer.

We need to stop treating terrible AI summaries as your old angry uncle who is always raging about something that isn’t even happening (frankly we should stop placating him too). This is unacceptable and if you’re shipping, it’s on you as the developer.

Full stop.

Related Posts

Thoughts on Apple Bloggers and Vision Pro Coverage

I posted this on Mastodon, but I figured I would cross-post it here as well. I wonder if we’re headed for a weird place with the #Apple Blogosphere (AKA the Apple Blog Mafia). All of the main players are talking about Vision Pro all the time and saying things like “I lose track of time in here!

Read more

The Simple Pleasures of a Mobile Office Whiteboard

I’ve built a lot of stuff for my home office over the last few years of working from home, but my current favorite is something so simple: A custom rolling whiteboard A couple of weeks ago I gave myself a Saturday challenge to take my existing old whiteboard and build a rolling stand for it only with materials I had in my workshop.

Read more

I Made Myself a JARVIS Over the Weekend

With some spare parts, a USB speakerphone, and my Home Assistant server, I was able to make a competent JARVIS for my home office over the weekend…and the exciting part is that it’s only going to keep getting better! Last year was the “Year of Voice” for Home Assistant, the open source home automation platform, and the team accomplished a ton of work that enables Home Assistant users to make their own voice assistants.

Read more