Everything you need to know about Apple Intelligence summaries and how to use them

Summarize with Apple Intelligence

30 Oct 2024, 12:34 · TechRadar

Features By Graham Barlow published 30 October 2024

(Image credit: Apple)

Summaries are one of the features of Apple intelligence that we’ve been treated to in iOS 18.1. While the big hitters like Image Playground and Genmoji are due to arrive in iOS 18.2 in December, we can enjoy some Apple Intelligence features, like summaries, right now.

Provided you have a compatible Apple device and have turned on Apple Intelligence, Summaries appear in a number of places in the latest version of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS Sequoia, so here we’ll show you how to access them in every place Apple has hidden them away, making sure you don’t miss out on anything.

Mail and summaries

(Image credit: Future / Apple)

Using summaries in the Mail app is a fantastic timesaver. Just open a new email in Mail, drag the screen down (on an iPhone or iPad), and a new Summarize button springs into view. Tap this to get the email summary right at the top of the message. The summary is around five to six lines and can help you decide if it’s worth reading the whole email. Once your summary has been created it lives forever, so if you go back to your inbox, then return to the email you can see it again.

You’ll also have preview summaries of each email in your inbox. These are visible when you look at your inbox and before you even tap on an email. On an iPhone or iPad, you can change the length of the preview to up to 5 lines in Settings>Mail>Preview.

Messages and summaries

(Image credit: Future / Apple / @spreen_co)

When it comes to Message alerts on your Lockscreen, you can now see Notification summaries of each message you receive thanks to Apple Intelligence. These summaries have received a bit of negative press recently when somebody received a breakup text that had been ruthlessly summarised by Apple Intelligence, but they can be a nice space saver, and help you get the gist of a conversation without having to read each text.

You might not like these Notification summaries for Messages, however, so to turn them off go to Settings>Apps>Messages and toggle off Summarize Previews.

Notification summaries in third party apps

(Image credit: Future, Apple, inc.)

Notification summaries work in other apps on your lock screen too, like Meta's Messenger and the Slack app. Again, to control how these are displayed you need to go into Settings>Apps and find the app in question, then toggle Summarize Previews on or off.

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