Apple Intelligence: Summarization and Mail

Technology is consistently entertaining new crazes. Some examples include blockchain, subscription juicers, netbooks, 3D televisions, hyperloop, and "hoverboards", just to name a handful of examples. All of these were going to be "the next big thing", but none of these have panned out as the inventors intended.

There has been a term bandied about that people think may be the end-all for computers. Said term is "Artificial Intelligence", or "AI". The term "AI" can mean a variety of different things, depending on whom you ask. However, when most use the term AI, what they are expecting is a fully conscious and sentient entity that can think, act, and rationalize as a human would. This is called "Artificial General Intelligence". Today's technology is nowhere even close to being able to come to this reality. It is not yet known whether or not Artificial Intelligence will actually live up to its ultimate expectations.

Apple is not known for being jumping on bandwagons and being the first to create new categories of technology; they typically leave that to others. However, if there is a technology that they can put their own spin on, they might do so. At their World Wide Developer Conference 24, they introduced one of these types of technologies, called "Apple Intelligence".

Apple Intelligence is not a single item; in fact, it goes against the grain of other AI assistants and only works on your data. Apple Intelligence consists of a variety of tools to help you accomplish a specific task. When introduced, Apple indicated that the initial features of Apple Intelligence would be released over the course of the iOS/iPad 18 and macOS Sequoia releases.

The items that comprise Apple Intelligence include: Writing Tools, Image Generation, and Personalized Requests. Initially, Apple wanted to have the first items available with iOS 18; however, during the beta, Apple realized that the features would not be far enough along for an initial iOS/iPadOS 18.0 and macOS Sequoia (15.0) release, so they were pushed to iOS/iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1.

Not every device that can run iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, or macOS Sequoia 15.1 is able to support Apple Intelligence. To be able to run Apple Intelligence you need to have one of the following devices:

• iPhone 16/Plus (A18)
• iPhone 16 Pro/Pro Max (A18 Pro)
• iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max (A17 Pro)
• iPad mini (A17 Pro or later)
• iPad Air (M1 or later)
• iPad Pro (M1 or later)
• Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later)

The reason that these devices are the minimum is a combination of needing 8GB of memory, as well as a neural engine.

This article is part of an on-going series that covers the features of Apple Intelligence, as they become available. This article focuses on the Apple Intelligence feature called "Summarization".

Summarization

Communication is an important part of human society. As humans, we have become quite adept at creating ways of communicating. There are effectively two types of communication: asynchronous communications and synchronous, or real-time, communications. Asynchronous communications could be something like newspapers, magazines, and for something more modern, email, and even social media. Real-time communications can include things like text messages, iMessages, WhatsApp, and Google Chat, just to name a handful.

There are those communications that are more informational and more than likely a one-way. The prime example of this is notifications from an app. This can be a notification about an email, a new podcast episode, or even just a notification about a new post from one of your friends.

With the amount of text that everyone comes across each day, it can easily become overwhelming. For notifications, you can just disable all notifications for an app within the Settings app on iOS and iPadOS, or System Settings on macOS, but this is not always a viable solution depending on your needs.

There are a number of areas where you can get summaries. This includes notifications and email. Let us start with notifications.

Summarizing Notifications

Sometimes, it would be great to be able to get a brief synopsis of the notifications that you have received. Now with Apple Intelligence, you can actually have this occur. Below is the summarized post from Ivory from my friend, Barry:

"Sequoia and Time Machine backups issues, one SSD stopped working, the other slow."

Here is the original text:

"Have you had any issues with Sequoia and Time Machine backups? I have two SSD's that used to alternate backups but one has stopped working and the other takes forever to run the "cleaning up" portion of the backup at the end."

This is a pretty good summary of the original text. When I saw this message, I immediately tapped to see the entire message. This is not the only example of summarization. Here is another example from Overcast:

"No episode today; return on Friday, October 10th; Google's Play Store remedies discussed."

The way that this seems to work is by summarizing the titles of the podcast. In most cases, this might be okay, but this is missing some key details, in particular, which podcast does not have an episode today. Now, later in the day, after additional episodes were downloaded, this was the summary:

"Stratechery discusses Google's Play Store remedies; Rebound Prime episode bootleg available"

As you could have surmised, this is a much better summary of the notifications that I received for the various podcasts I subscribe to.

Now, it should be noted that this is with iOS 18.1, which means that developers do not have access to any sort of application programming interface, or API, for suggesting anything to Apple Intelligence, so this is strictly what Apple's own models think is the proper summary.

Another tidbit to note is that each app will be summarized on its own. Therefore, you will get a different summary for your iMessage conversations, Instagram posts, and Overcast podcast notifications. That is not the only summarization that you can get; you can also get summaries of emails.

Email Summaries

Everyone has received a rather long email, and you may want a short summary of the email. Mail on iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sierra 15.1 will handle this for you automatically. When you view your list of emails, you will see a summary directly below the sender and subject line.

While each email is automatically summarized, you can also get a longer summary within the email message. The way that you can do this is by using the following steps:

1. Open Mail.
2. Locate the email message that you would like to summarize.
3. Scroll up to the top of the email message.
4. Click on the "Summarize" button.

Once you click on this, Apple Intelligence will then analyze the email message and then provide a summary directly above the email.

Here are three different summaries of Justin Robert Young's "Free Political Newsletter."

From September 30th, 2024: "The article discusses the possibility of an October Surprise in the upcoming election, categorizing potential surprises into four types: policy surprises, opposition dumps, acts of God, and legal surprises. It also highlights James Carville's opinion that swing states are likely to move as a block, rather than splitting evenly."

From October 4th, 2024: "The article discusses the possibility of an October Surprise in the upcoming election, categorizing potential surprises into four types: policy surprises, opposition dumps, acts of God, and legal surprises. It also highlights James Carville's opinion that swing states are likely to move as a block, rather than splitting evenly."

From October 7th, 2024: "Democratic ads focus on healthcare and portray Kamala Harris as caring, while Republican ads portray her as frivolous and unserious. The GOP Senate map is favorable, but the party may not have the funds to play in all the states they could win."

All of these are decent summaries of the email messages. As you might suspect, you can only summarize a single email message at a time. You cannot summarize multiple emails, and this makes sense because the emails could be a variety of different topics. Now, the items above were decent examples, but not all emails are great for summarization. Here is what each of Audible's Daily Deal Emails results in:

"Today's Daily Deal is $2.99 and ends at 11:59 PM PT. Offer is not transferable, cannot be combined with other offers, and sale titles are not eligible for return."

Now, honestly, these are completely useless because the title is never displayed. The reason for this is because the emails from Audible never include the title within the email. Instead, the data is not shown until it is downloaded.

To Preview or Not to Preview

Mail provides you with the ability to control whether or not each message preview should be summarized or not. By default, this feature is enabled, but you can change it if you do not want any previews. The method by which you accomplish this depends on the operating system. You can use the steps below to change the setting.

On macOS

1. Open the Mail app.
2. Click on the "Mail" menu item.
3. Click on Settings.
4. Click on the "Viewing" tab.
5. Uncheck "Summarize Message Previews".

On iOS/iPadOS

1. Open Settings.
2. Scroll down to "Apps".
3. Tap on Apps to open up the apps list.
4. Scroll down to, or search for, Mail.
5. Tap on Mail to open its settings.
6. Under Message List, tap the toggle for "Summarize Message Previews".

These are pretty straightforward steps to change whether Mail summarizes message previews within the message list. This is not the only Apple Intelligence item related to Mail. Mail has a couple of other features, including smart replies and priority messages. Let us look at both, starting with Smart Replies.

Smart Replies in Mail

When you receive an email, you may want to write a reply, but may not always be able to come up with the right words. It could be helpful to have an appropriate reply generated for you. This is possible with a new feature called "Smart Replies". Smart Replies are designed to create a reply to an email on your behalf. This is done by looking for any questions within the email and then generating a contextual response.

As an example, I looked at an email that I got from Patreon for an episode of "The Morning Stream" with Scott Johnson and Brian Ibbott. Live listeners generate possible titles during the show, and sometimes topics can also generate titles. Within this particular episode, one of the titles was "Is it too early for a Chicken Big Mac?". The mail app on iOS provided two possible responses within the Quick Type bar, "Yes" and "No". If I clicked on one of these, it would provide an appropriate response.

For " Yes", it was "Yes, it is too early for a Chicken Big Mac. I'll have to wait until later in the day to enjoy one." For "No", it created "No, it's never too early for a Chicken Big Mac." For any TMS listeners, the answer is always "No, it's never too early for a Chicken Big Mac". This is just one example of how it might be used. Here is another example.

Recently, I went to a book signing for John Scalzi's Starter Villain at my local bookstore. I received the confirmation for the event, and the mail provided two options for replying.

The first option was "I'll be there", and the generated response was "I'll be there tonight. I'm looking forward to meeting John Scalzi and getting my book signed." The second option was "Can't make it", and the generated response for this was "Hi, Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to the event tonight. Thanks…"

Both of these are appropriate, and for the "I'll be there" option, it absolutely took contextual clues from the email to provide an appropriate response. Obviously, your mileage will vary given that each email is different. I tested a bunch of emails, and some did not provide any smart reply options, so you may not always see suggestions. There is one last feature: Priority emails.

Priority Messages

A lot of people receive a tremendous amount of email in the course of a day. I am not one of these people. The emails that I receive are generally just informational emails, like from Patreon, bills, or even newsletters. It is not often that I get a personal email sent to me. However, there are those that get a lot of emails. For these individuals, it might be crucial to see the most important emails. Now, with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sierra 15.1, this is a feature that you can utilize.

Much like Smart Replies and Summarization, Priority Inbox is enabled by default, including on the "All Inboxes" mailbox, if you have more than one configured mail account. You can configure each inbox for Priority Messages by performing the following steps:

1. Open the Mail app.
2. Click on the inbox you want to configure for Priority.
3. Click on the "…" icon in the upper right corner.
4. Uncheck "Show Priority".

If you have Priority inbox enabled, Mail will attempt to bring the most important messages to the top of your inbox. This is useful to make sure that you see the items that you really need to see. Now, it should be noted, that this is not Mail Categorization. That is not available in iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, or macOS Sequoia 15.1. Mail Categorization will be available in a future update.

Closing Thoughts on Summarization and Mail

You can easily get a quick summary of notifications. This could be a series of messages from a group chat, notification about new podcast episodes, or even notifications. Each summary is grouped by app, and these summarizations will be updated as new notifications come in. But these are not the only summaries that you can receive. Mail will automatically provide a summary for you. These summaries are shown below the sender and email subject and are typically only a line long. If you want a slightly longer summary, you can get this by clicking on the "Summarize" button above the email.

Mail will automatically organize your emails to show "Priority Messages". Priority Messages are those messages that Mail thinks are the most important to you. While it is enabled by default, you can configure this behavior on a per-inbox basis.

Be sure to check out all of the other articles in the series:

• Introduction to Apple Intelligence
• Apple Intelligence: Type with Siri

You can also check out all articles about Apple Intelligence