Learn how to use Apple Intelligence on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to summarize long emails, web articles, notes, messages, and other text to stay informed and productive with minimal effort.
We live in a digital-first world, and it can undoubtedly become a challenge to go through every long website article, email, text, and document, especially if you receive tons of them from your work or friends.
Thankfully, Apple’s in-house AI – called Apple Intelligence – can help simplify this by going through long pieces of text and giving you a concise gist. You can read the generated summary to understand the context of that email, article, or note. Of course, we recommend reading the entire actual text if it’s something very important.
Summarize text using Apple Intelligence
Summarizing text is a part of Apple Intelligence. So head over to our tutorial on getting Apple Intelligence on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac if you haven’t already, and then follow the steps below. Note that, as of now, Apple Intelligence text summarization only works if the content is in English.
Emails
- Open the Apple Mail app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
- Go inside a conversation.
- Tap the Summarize button from the top right corner.
- Wait for a few seconds, and Apple Intelligence will show you a short summary.
Note that you can also summarize the email you compose so it’s concise and the recipient can read it in less time. The process for this is similar to what we’ve explained in the Notes app section below.
Safari
- Open Safari and visit the article.
- Invoke Reader Mode for this article by hitting the options icon and selecting Show Reader.
- Wait a second or two and hit the Summarize button to get a gist of this web article.
If you’re on a Mac, clicking Edit in Safari’s top menu bar shows a Writing Tools option, which has Summarize as well as a Create Key Points sub-options. However, as of now, these are grayed out on both my Mac mini and MacBook Pro. Hopefully, a future macOS update will make it active.
Messages
When you get a text message or iMessage, your iPhone may summarize it automatically and show the summary in the Notification Center as well as the conversations screen in the Messages app. When the message has been summarized, a summarize button appears at the beginning of the text.
Of course, not all messages are summarized. And you can always go inside the conversation to read the full text as it was sent.
Notes
You can summarize what you write in the Notes app. Additionally, you can copy text from elsewhere, like a Pages app document, paste it into your note body, and then have Apple Intelligence summarize it for you.
On iPhone or iPad
- Select text in the Notes app.
- Tap the beautiful Apple Intelligence icon above the keyboard if it appears. If not, tap Writing Tools from the thin menu strip.
- Hit the Summary option.
On Mac
- Select text in the Notes app.
- Right-click over the selected text and go to Writing Tools > Summarize.
Alternatively, you can select text in Notes and click Edit > Writing Tools > Summarize from the top menu bar.
Other apps
You can select text in other (but not all) iOS apps and tap Writing Tools > Summary to generate a distilled form of selected text.
If you are on a Mac, select text and click Edit > Writing Tools > Summarize from the top menu bar.
Apple Intelligence Summary is not perfect
Like other AI models, Apple Intelligence can refuse to summarize some text, come up with an incorrect summary, or leave out the main substance of the original text.
Of course, it’s expected to get better with time, but we recommend not to rely solely on AI summaries for important emails, texts, and articles.
If Apple Intelligence shows a wrong or inappropriate summary, you can report it to Apple. You will see the option to share feedback with Apple right on the Summary screen.
On a related note: 17 iPhone features that use Machine Learning and AI