Apple Intelligence: What you should know about summaries and intelligent responses

Summaries and smart reply options aren’t the flashiest features of Apple Intelligence, but they are features Apple is introducing in iOS 18.1 that have the potential to be useful for most people’s daily device usage.

Summaries

Summaries are available throughout the operating system and can be used in different ways across apps, notifications, email, and more.

Emails and messages

In your email inbox in the Mail app, you’ll see an AI summary of the main content of the email message, so you can see at a glance whether it’s important. You don’t get a lot of information, but it’s enough to provide context when the title doesn’t reveal what an email is about. When you tap on an email, you can get an overview using the “Summarize” option at the top.

The lock screen displays summaries of incoming messages so you can decide whether a reply is important. This is particularly useful for long messages as it brings out the most important parts well. You can also view summaries of unread messages directly in the Messages app.

You can turn off message summaries by going to Settings > Apps > Messages and turning off Aggregate Messages. Disable email summaries in the same way, but in the Email section.

Notifications

For almost all of your notifications, Apple Intelligence can group them and give you a quick one-sentence summary of the content. Tapping expands the stack so you can see everything individually.

Notification summaries work for built-in apps like Messages and also for your third-party apps. Apple Intelligence tries to find out what is most relevant. With messaging apps or email, you get a quick summary of one or two messages, while aggregates like camera motion notifications are grouped so you can see at a glance which areas have had motion activations.

Notification summaries occur automatically if you have Apple Intelligence enabled. However, if you want to turn them off, you can do so by opening the Settings app, going to Notifications, and turning off Aggregate Previews. You can disable the feature completely or for each individual app.

safari

Safari supports a new Apple Intelligence summary feature that allows you to get an overview of web pages or articles. If you see a purple sparkle in the URL bar, you can tap it to see a summary.

Summaries are technically part of Reading Mode, but you don’t always have to switch to Reading Mode to view a summary. Summaries are automatically displayed for longer articles. However, if you don’t see a summary, tap Reading Mode and then tap the Summarize button.

You can also select any text anywhere in Safari, then tap Writing Tools and choose Summary to get a summary of your highlighted text. This summary feature is part of the writing tools.

Summaries typically last a paragraph at most, so you don’t always get a complete picture of an article’s content. It’s more of an overview to show you whether it’s worth reading.

Notes

In the Notes app, like in Safari, you can select text and select the “Writing Tools Summary” option. However, it also creates summaries for recorded phone call logs and transcripts of voice note recordings captured using the Notes app.

In a note with a recording, tap it and you’ll see a “Summary” option at the top, which allows you to get a summary of a transcript. Note that telephone call recordings, voice memos in Notes, and transcripts of these recordings are available to anyone. Only the summary feature is an Apple Intelligence feature.

Other apps

In all apps, you can select any text and use the writing tools to create a summary of that text, just like in Safari and Notes.

Smart answers

Smart replies are a feature in Mail and Messages and appear in the suggestion bar above the keyboard.

Smart replies can be useful when replying to a message that contains a clear question, such as: E.g. “Would you like to go to the cinema tonight?” or “Have you seen?” [insert popular TV show here] last night?”

For most other answers it is less useful. Intelligent answers don’t seem to learn from individual tone or voice, and suggestions don’t always sound like they’re coming from a human. Typically, a lot of “Haha” responses and exclamation points are used, and if “Haha” isn’t suggested as a response, it’s often rephrasing what the other person said, which is generally not the way people respond to messages react.

How useful are these features?

Smart Replies and other Apple Intelligence features are currently in beta and will be released in beta. Summaries can still be improved in terms of verbosity, but the option is already useful, especially when viewing notifications on the lock screen or scrolling through your email messages.

Summaries for longer form content could be more detailed, and for now you only get a general overview.

Smart replies are of questionable use right now, and hopefully this will get much better when Siri’s personal context features are released next year. At the moment, Smart Replies can almost be more annoying, but we’re still in the early days of Apple Intelligence.

Apple Intelligence requirements

To use Apple Intelligence’s Summary and Smart Reply features, you need a device that supports Apple Intelligence. This includes the iPhone 15 Pro, the “iPhone 15” Pro Max, any iPhone 16 model, any iPad with an M-series chip, and any Mac with an M-series chip.

Due to the processing power and storage required, Apple Intelligence features will not work on any other device.

Release date

Apple Intelligence is currently included in the iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 betas. The betas are available to developers and public beta testers. The updates are expected to be released on Monday, October 28th.