Apple released iOS 18.2 in December, more than a month after the tech giant released iOS 18.1. The update brought a number of new Apple Intelligence features, such as Genmoji and Image Playground, to people with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max or a device from the iPhone 16 line. However, iOS 18.1 gave those iPhone owners access to Apple Intelligence, which can provide summaries in many places on their devices.
Read more: Your iOS 18 cheat sheet
With Apple Intelligence and a compatible iPhone, your device can give you a summary of a long email, a web page, message notifications and more. It can also show you a summary of what you’ve written in Notes and other messages.
Here’s what you need to know about summaries with Apple Intelligence on your iPhone. Note that before you can use Apple Intelligence, you must download it for your iPhone. To do this, go to Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri and tap Get Apple Intelligence.
Summary in Mail
Analyzing emails and email chains for information can be tedious, especially if you get a lot of work emails sent to your device. Thankfully, Apple Intelligence can digest emails for you, so you don’t read too much preamble and want to get straight to the heart of the message.
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To view email summaries, open Mail, select the email you want to read, and then drag the screen down to reveal a new one Summarize the button. Tap this and you’ll see a few lines of summary. You can change the number of summary lines you see by going to Settings > Applications > Mail > Preview and selecting anything from no summary lines to five.
It’s also important to note that if you’re using iOS 18.2’s Mail Categories, you can only see AI summaries for emails in your Primary category. Emails in other categories will not give you summaries. If you’re using List View in Mail, all your emails will have a summary available.
Read more: What you need to know about mail categories in iOS 18.2
Summary of announcements
With Apple Intelligence, some of your apps can give you notification summaries on your lock screen, and this feature is enabled by default in most cases. This feature can summarize your notifications in a few words, but be careful when reading them. According to the BBC, one of the publication’s titles was summarized incorrectly.
If you don’t want to risk reading a bad review, you can disable this feature. Go to Settings > Notifications > Notification summary and tap the switches next to the apps you no longer want to receive notification summaries from. You can also tap the toggle button next to it Summary of notices at the top of the menu to disable the feature for all apps.
Read more: Apple’s notification summaries can be absurdly wrong
Summary of web pages in Safari
Apple Intelligence can also summarize some web pages in Safari. To see these summaries, open Safari and go to a website, then look on the left side of the address bar. You should see a rectangle with some dashes below it and it glows. Tap this symbol and it opens a menu showing the summary of the website.
Note that this feature is not available on all websites. On websites this feature does not work yet, the icon on the left side of the address bar will not have any glow.
Summarize the text with writing tools
Writing Tools is an Apple Intelligence menu that lets you correct, edit, or change something you’re writing. It also allows you to summarize your message or notes.
To view these summaries, highlight what 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 Briefing. Writing Tools will show you a summary of what you’ve highlighted and let you Copy, Replace AND Share that summary. These summaries can help you prepare for a presentation, allow you to quickly read anything in Notes, or condense your messages to just the main points.
Read more: Proofread, edit and more with Apple’s intelligent writing tools
For more on iOS 18, here’s what you need to know about iOS 18.2 and iOS 18.1 and our iOS 18 cheat sheet. You can also check out what might be coming to your iPhone with iOS 18.3.
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