Apple introduces AI-driven app review summaries in iOS 18.4 update

With the iOS 18.4 update, currently in public beta, Apple's rolling out a cool new feature: AI-powered summaries of App Store reviews. They're using their own AI tech, called Apple Intelligence, to whip up these summaries based on what other folks have said about the apps. Pretty neat, huh?

These summaries are crafted by large language models (LLMs) and they boil down the key points into a handy little paragraph. Apple's site says they'll update these summaries every week for apps and games that get enough reviews to make it work, but they haven't spilled the beans on what that magic number is yet.

If you spot any issues with the summaries, you can just tap and hold on the review to report it. And if you're a developer, you can flag any problems through App Store Connect.

Right now, these AI summaries are kicking off in the U.S. in English, but Apple plans to expand them to more apps, markets, and languages throughout the year. They'll also be popping up in iPadOS 18.4.

Macworld was the first to spot this feature in the recent beta release. But, there's a catch: it might encourage some shady app developers to flood their ratings with fake reviews from bots or paid commenters. This kind of thing's already a headache in the app world, and AI summaries might just make it worse. People might start leaning too much on the summary instead of digging into all the reviews, both the good and the bad.

It's also a test for Apple's AI to pick out and highlight any negative comments or concerns in the reviews. Not an easy task, but we'll see how they do.

Apple's not the only big tech player jumping on the AI review summary bandwagon. Amazon started doing it for product reviews back in 2023, and Google's Gemini AI can do it too, according to a developer tutorial. Google also added AI-powered review summaries to Google Maps last year.

If you're a beta tester, you can check out these AI summaries now with the latest release (iOS 18.4, beta 2 and iPadOS 18.4, beta 2). The rest of us will get to play with it in April when the new software rolls out to everyone.

And that's not all! iOS 18.4 is bringing a bunch of other goodies, like more languages for Apple Intelligence, access to Apple Intelligence for EU users, Visual Intelligence on the iPhone 15 Pro, new Control Center options for Siri, the ability to pause app downloads, and an AI-powered feature to sort out your important notifications from the rest.