By Julie Clover
Summaries and smart replies aren’t the flashiest Apple Intelligence features, but they’re capabilities Apple is introducing in iOS 18.1 that most people will find useful in their day-to-day use of their devices.
Summaries
Summaries are available throughout the operating system and can be used in a variety of ways for apps, notifications, emails, and more.
Mail and Messages
In your email inbox in the Mail app, you’ll see an AI summary of the main content of an email so you can tell at a glance what’s important. You don’t get a lot of information, but it’s enough to give context when the title doesn’t reveal what the email is about. When you tap on an email, you can use the “Summarize” option at the top to get an overview.
You’ll see summaries of incoming messages on your lock screen so you can decide if it’s important to respond. This is especially useful for long messages because it does a good job of pulling out the most important parts. You can also see summaries of unread messages right in the Messages app.
You can turn off message summaries by going to Settings > Apps > Messages and turning off “Message summaries.” Turn off mail summaries the same way, but in the Mail section.
Notifications
Apple Intelligence can group almost all of your notifications together and give you a one-sentence summary of what’s in them. Clicking expands the stack so you can see everything individually.
Notification summaries work for built-in apps like Messages, as well as third-party apps. Apple Intelligence tries to pick out what’s most relevant. For messaging or email apps, it’ll give you a quick overview of one or two messages, while aggregates like camera motion notifications are grouped together so you can see at a glance which areas have had motion activations.
Notification summaries appear automatically when you have Apple Intelligence enabled, but if you want to turn them off, you can do so by opening the Settings app, going to Notifications, and turning off Notification Summary Previews. You can turn this feature off entirely or on an app-by-app basis.
Safari
Safari supports Apple’s new Intelligence Summary feature, which lets you get an overview of web pages or articles. If you see a purple glow on the URL bar, you can tap it to see a summary.
Technically, summaries are part of Reading Mode, but you don't always have to be in Reading Mode to see them. For longer articles, summaries appear automatically, but if you don't see them, 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 the text you selected. This summary feature is part of Writing Tools.
Summaries are usually a paragraph at most, so you don't always get the full picture of what's in the article. They're more of an overview to help you decide whether it's worth reading.
Notes
In the Notes app, you can highlight text and select the Writing Tools Summary option, just like in Safari, but there are also summaries created for recorded phone call transcripts and transcripts of voice memo recordings made with the Notes app.
In a note with a recording, tap it and you'll see a Summary option at the top that you can select to get a transcript summary. Note that the phone call recording, voice memos in Notes, and transcripts of those recordings are publicly available. Only the summary feature is an Apple Intelligence feature.
Other apps
In all apps, you can highlight any text and use Write Tools to create a summary of that text, just like you do in Safari and Notes.
Smart replies
Smart replies are a feature in Mail and Messages, and you'll see them in the suggestion bar above the keyboard.
Smart replies can be useful when you're replying to a message that has a clear question, like “Want to go to a movie tonight?” or “Did you watch [insert popular TV show] last night?”
It's less useful for most other responses. Smart Replies doesn't seem to learn based on individual tone or voice, and most of the time the sentences don't always sound like they were given by a human. It tends to use a lot of “haha” and exclamation points, and when it doesn't offer “haha” as a response, it often paraphrases what the other person said, which isn't typically how people respond to messages.
How useful are these features?
Smart Replies and other Apple Intelligence features are currently in beta and will also be released in beta. Summary could be improved in terms of completeness, but the feature is already useful, especially when looking at notifications on the lock screen or scrolling through emails.
Summaries for longer content could be more detailed, but right now you only get a high-level overview.
Smart Replies are currently questionable to use, and hopefully this will get much better when Siri's personal context features are released next year. Right now, Smart Replies can be more of an annoyance, but we're in the very early stages of Apple Intelligence.
Apple Intelligence Requirements
To use summary and Apple Intelligence, you need a device that supports Apple Intelligence. These include the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15, and iPhone 15. Pro Max, any iPhone 16 model, any iPad with an M-series chip, and any Mac with an M-series chip.
Apple Intelligence features don't work on other devices due to the processing power and memory required.
Release Date
Apple Intelligence is currently in the iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 betas. The betas are available to developers and public beta testers, and the updates are expected to ship on Monday, October 28.
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