Apple iOS 18.4 adds AI-powered App Review Summaries
Apple’s AI technology, Apple Intelligence, will be used to provide an overall summary based on the reviews left by others in the App Store. Apple Intelligence’s AI will be used to generate the summary. It will use the information from other App Store reviews. Apple has not specified the threshold for generating a summary. The summaries are also refreshed every week for games and apps that have received enough reviews. App Store users can hold down the review and report any issues with the feature, while app developers are able to alert Apple via App Store Connect. The AI summaries are first available in English in the U.S. and then will be rolled out to other markets and languages in the following year. This feature will be available on iPadOS 18.4. The feature, which was first noticed by Macworld during the beta release of the latest version, could encourage app developers who are not so scrupulous to fill their rating and review sections with fake comments left by bots, or paid commenters, who praise an app or game, or make positive remarks regarding its features or price. While this is a fairly common practice, it could be made worse by adding AI summaries. This can happen on any website that provides customer reviews for a product. The feature tests Apple’s AI for its ability to extract and parse negative comments and concerns from the App Store reviews. These AI summaries highlight these to customers.
Apple’s not the only tech company that uses AI to analyze reviews. Amazon launched AI summaries of product reviews in 2023. Google’s Gemini AI is also useful for summarizing product reviews, according to a developer tutorial. Google Maps also has AI-powered reviews summaries. The AI summaries will be available to the public in April, when the software is rolled out to everyone.
