The writing tools will be a big part of the first Apple Intelligence features coming to Apple devices later this month. Among these tools, AI-powered overview is one that people use again and again.
Because the overview is not limited to one app. Like other writing features in Apple Intelligence, it’s available anywhere you can enter text. Summaries can also help you save time when faced with long articles, long messages, or large blocks of text.
Knowing what Apple Intelligence can summarize and how to access its functionality is half the battle to incorporating this functionality into your workflow. I’m running the iOS 18.1 public beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, and I can share what I’ve learned about the Overview tool in a variety of apps.
Safari overview
What can be summarized: Apple Intelligence summarizes web pages, focusing on condensing articles into two- to three-sentence summaries. In some cases, the summary may also include a table of contents.
How to access the Overview tool in Safari: You can access the summary from Safari Reader. Safari Reader is accessed by tapping the reader icon to the left of the URL/search bar. In the pop-up menu that follows,[リーダーの表示]to view the article in a more readable format. Tap the “Summary” button at the top of the screen to generate a summary.
Safari Overview is not a feature exclusive to Apple Intelligence and can also appear on phones running iOS 18, which can’t support Apple Intelligence. For example, you can now access Overview on iPhone 12. However, summaries aren’t always available on devices that can’t support Apple Intelligence. Once complete, you’ll see a purple AI icon in the URL/search bar and a summary before jumping to reader view.
What I think about Safari overview: The summaries produced by Apple Intelligence that I’ve seen are fairly accurate, but their short length means you only get a 1,000-yard view of the article. That might be enough for some people, especially those who do web searches and want to make sure an article covers the topic they want before reading the entire article.
In my experience, I’ve found that Safari summaries are best for news articles where you just need to get the gist of the news, not the nitty-gritty details. The table of contents feature is useful for long articles, but it doesn’t appear as regularly as you’d like.
Memo summary
What can be summarized: The summarization feature touches on two areas of Notes. Select any text and[書き込みツール]You can get an overview of its selections from the menu. You can also get a summary of the recordings you’ve embedded in your notes. Remember, voice recording is a new notes feature in iOS 18 that is available to everyone.
How to access the Notes Overview tool: It all depends on what you’re trying to summarize. For memo text, select the text and from the menu that appears[書き込みツール]Tap. (It appears alongside other commands such as copy, translate, etc.)[書き込みツール]When you select[書き込みツール]at the bottom of the menu[概要]The command will be displayed.
To get a summary of an audio recording in Notes, tap the embedded recording. On the next screen,[要約]Tap the command.
What I think about Notes summaries: The value of a summary depends on the length of the memo or audio recording. Because longer excerpts are likely to benefit most from being condensed into easily digestible paragraphs. At least it will help you quickly understand the contents of your notes.
When it comes to the accuracy of summaries, we generally benefit. A recording I made reading Julius Caesar’s funeral oration produced a somewhat confusing summary, but that could be the Elizabethan language tripping up Apple Intelligence. However, I had no problem parsing the monologue in “Mirror’s Crossing.”
Email summary
What can be summarized: Like Notes, Mail provides summaries in two formats. In your inbox, most messages include a two-line summary that highlights the important points of the email. (Previously, only the first few lines of the email itself were visible.) Also, the message itself[要約]There’s a button that generates a quick summary of the conversation, whether it’s a single message or a long email chain.
How to access the email summary tool: Once you have a summary in your inbox, you don’t need to do anything. The summary will be displayed automatically.
To summarize a conversation, simply tap the “Summary” button that appears above the subject and sender information at the top of the screen.
What I think about email summaries: A hands-on overview tool in the iPhone’s Mail app provides a detailed explanation of how the feature works, but the overview is typically very short for long email chains involving multiple people. I found it helpful. What I’m particularly impressed with is that in email conversations when planning an event, the summary highlights important information, allowing you to cut through the back-and-forth and get to the heart of the discussion.
Message summary
What can be summarized: Similar to summaries that occur with incoming emails, messages can also undergo summaries because Apple Intelligence converts multiple messages into a single notification that appears on your iPhone’s lock screen.
How to access the message summary tool: Again, this is very similar to the email inbox summarization tool and appears to automatically summarize text. There’s a setting in the Messages section of the Settings app that lets you turn off text summaries if you want.
What I think about message summaries: Our test phone, running iOS 18.1, is not a regular cell phone, so it can’t receive the same amount of text messages that you can receive on an iPhone 12. The tester cell phone receives several messages, but none. I have received summary treatment so far.
Some of my colleagues at Tom’s Guide have seen the summary in action, and they’re not that impressed. Tony Polanco from our Computing team found that this feature worked sporadically. Some messages are summarized, while others are not. And that summary isn’t always as accurate as you might hope.
A quick search of the internet reveals that Tony’s experience is not unique. This certainly appears to be one of the areas in the Apple Intelligence brief that needs the most tweaking ahead of the wider release of iOS 18.1 this month.
Overview of other apps
I think the main areas where people will use Apple Intelligence’s summarization tools will be in Mail, Safari, and probably Notes, but as I said at the beginning, writing tools are available in any app where you enter text, so summarizing The function is there. Too. That being said, it doesn’t always make sense to use the summary feature. When I tried to get a summary for one of my entries in the journal app, I got a warning that the summary feature wasn’t really intended for this type of writing. I have to agree with Apple Intelligence on this point.
Other built-in apps support summarization further. For example, I used this feature to get a summary of news reports in Apple’s News app. I’m not a Pages user, but I think this tool works well with Pages as well.
You can also see an overview of third-party apps with text capabilities, such as writing and news apps. Chat apps can be hit or miss depending on how the app is built. For example, in Slack, I had to copy the text of a message from a work colleague and copy it into Notes before I could get a decent overview. Long post about upcoming training sessions. But in the CNN app, I was able to highlight text and get a summary just as easily as in the built-in news app.
