Apple adds AI-powered app review summaries with iOS 18.4 | TechCrunch

As part of the iOS 18.4 software update, currently in public beta, Apple is introducing AI-powered summaries of App Store reviews. The new feature will leverage Apple Intelligence, the company’s built-in AI technology, to offer an overall summary based on the reviews others have left on the App Store.

The review summaries will be generated by large language models (LLMs) and will highlight key information into a short paragraph, Apple’s website explains. The summaries will also be refreshed weekly for apps and games that have enough reviews to generate a summary — though Apple did not say what that threshold is.

App Store users can tap and hold on the review to report any problems with the feature while app developers can alert Apple to problems via App Store Connect.

AI summaries will first be in the U.S. in English and will later roll out to all apps with a sufficient number of reviews in additional markets and languages over the course of the year. It will also be available in iPadOS 18.4.

The feature, first spotted by Macworld in the recent beta release, may encourage unscrupulous app developers to flood their ratings and review sections with fake reviews left by bots or other paid commenters who praise the app or game or make positive remarks about its features or pricing.

While this sort of thing is unfortunately already a common practice in the app industry — or really, any on any site that offers customer reviews of a product — adding AI summaries could worsen the problem. Consumers may begin to rely too heavily on the review summary itself instead of more carefully reading through all reviews, both good and bad.

The feature also tests the ability of Apple’s AI to carefully extract and parse any negative comments or concerns in the App Store reviews and highlight them for customers in these AI summaries.

Apple is not the only tech giant to look to AI for analyzing reviews. Amazon introduced AI summaries for product reviews on its platform back in 2023. Google’s Gemini AI can also be used for product reviews summaries, as one developer tutorial explains. The company also added AI-powered review summaries in Google Maps last year.

While the AI summaries are available now to beta testers with the latest release (iOS 18.4, beta 2 and iPadOS 18.4, beta 2), the feature will reach the general public in April when the new software rolls out to all.

Other anticipated features include an expanded set of Apple Intelligence languages that are supported, access to Apple Intelligence for EU users, access to Visual Intelligence on the iPhone 15 Pro, new Control Center options for Siri, and an AI-powered feature to prioritize important notifications over others.