Apple has introduced AI-powered ‘Priority Notifications’ feature in its latest ‘iOS 18.4 Beta 1’ update. With this, the tech titan is aiming to enhance how users manage alerts on their iPhones. This feature utilizes on-device Apple Intelligence to assess the significance of incoming notifications, elevating the most critical ones to a distinct section at the top of the Lock Screen.
In simple words, instead of displaying notifications in chronological order, this feature ensures that essential alerts are immediately visible, reducing the chance of them being overlooked amidst less important notifications.
Speaking of the significance, this feature could be particularly useful for urgent messages, work emails, calendar reminders, or breaking news that you don’t want to miss among less important notifications.
Interestingly, Priority Notifications is disabled in the latest beta version by default. Meanwhile, to activate the feature, users need to open the ‘Settings’ app. Then, they can tap on ‘Notifications,’ where they will find an option named ‘Select Prioritize Notifications.’ To enable it, they should toggle the feature to ‘On.’
Once enabled, your iPhone will intelligently organize notifications, highlighting those deemed most important based on your usage patterns and interactions, regardless of how old they are. This prioritization helps minimize distractions by filtering out less critical alerts.
Notably, Apple’s new notification prioritization feature works similarly to the priority mail feature in the Apple Mail app, which highlights important emails at the top of the inbox. Last year, Apple launched its Apple Intelligence suite, which is a collection of AI-powered features designed to enhance the user experience across Apple devices. These features likely include smarter Siri capabilities, improved text and image processing, and other AI-driven enhancements.
In the meantime, iOS 18.4 will introduce more than just the Prioritize Notifications feature. It will also add support for 10 new languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, making the system more accessible to a broader audience. But, Apple has hinted that Siri’s AI-powered upgrades may be pushed to iOS 18.5 instead of being included in iOS 18.4.
Earlier, Apple released iOS 18.3, which improved Visual Intelligence (enhancing image and text recognition features) but also disabled AI-generated summaries in the News app, due to accuracy concerns.
