Your Guide to Apple Intelligence Summaries in iOS 18

Released by Apple iOS 18.2 in December, more than a month after the tech giant was released iOS 18.1. The update brings some new features to Apple Intelligence, such as Genmoji and Picture Playgroundof people who have iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max or a tool from The iPhone 16 line. However, iOS 18.1 gives iPhone owners access to Apple Intelligence, which can provide summaries of many areas of their devices.

Read more: Your iOS 18 Cheat Sheet

With Apple Intelligence and a compatible iPhone, your device can give you a summary of long emails, webpages, Message notifications and more. It can also show you a summary of what you wrote in Notes and other messages.

Here’s what you need to know about Apple Intelligence summaries on your iPhone. Note that before you can use Apple Intelligence, you need to request it for your iPhone. To do this, go to Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri and tap Getting Apple Intelligence.

Mail summaries

Parsing through emails and email chains for information can be tedious, especially if you receive a lot of work emails sent to your device. Fortunately, Apple Intelligence can summarize emails for you so you don’t have to read a lot of introductions and want to get just the focus of the message.

A summary of an email confirming the purchase of Orville Peck's Stampede Tour tickets — It was a great show in case you were wondering.

Apple/CNET Screenshot

To view email summaries, open Mail, select the email you want to read, and then pull your screen down to reveal a new one. Summarize button. Tap it and you’ll see a few lines of summary. You can change how many summary lines you see by going to Settings> Apps> Mail> Preview and choose anything from no summary lines to five.

It is also important to remember that if you are using Mail Categories in iOS 18.2you will only see AI summaries for emails in your Primary category. Emails in other categories will not provide you with summaries. When you use List View in Mail all your emails have a summary available.

Notice summaries

With Apple Intelligence, some of your apps can give you summaries of notifications on your Lock Screen, and this feature is available by default in most cases. This part can summarize your notices in a few words, but be careful while reading it. According to BBCone of the publication titles was summed up incorrectly.

If you don’t want to risk reading a bad summary, you can turn this feature off. Go to Settings > Notifications > Summarize Notifications and tap the toggles next to the apps you no longer want to receive notification summaries. You can also tap the toggle next Summarize Notifications at the top of the menu to turn off the feature for all apps.

Safari webpage summaries

A summary of Safari in the CNET article iPhone 16 Plus vs. iPhone 16 Pro Max — Apple/CNET Screenshot

Apple Intelligence can also summarize some webpages in Safari. To view these summaries, open Safari and go to a webpage, then look to the left of the address bar. You will see a rectangle with some dashes under it and flashing. Tap this symbol and it will pull up a menu showing a summary of the webpage.

Note that this feature is not available on all web pages. On webpages this feature does not work yet, the symbol on the left side of the address bar does not have any flashes.

Summarize the text using the Writing Tools

Writing Tools an Apple Intelligence menu that allows you to proofread, edit or revise something you’ve written. It also allows you to summarize your message or notes.

To view these summaries, highlight the one you want to summarize, tap Writing Tools in the pop-up menu — you may need to scroll through the options in this menu — and then tap Summary. Writing Tools will show you a summary of your emphasis, and it will let you Copy, change and SHARE that summary. These summaries help you prepare for a presentation, allow you to quickly read anything in Notes or cut your own messages down to key points.

For more on iOS 18, here’s what to know iOS 18.2 and iOS 18.1 and ours iOS 18 cheat sheet. You can also see what might be coming to your iPhone iOS 18.3.