Safari Gets Apple Intelligence Improvement On IOS 18.1 With New Summary Features

Summarize, a new feature in Safari that utilizes Apple Intelligence (photo; x @Dexerto) technology

JAKARTA - The first investment from Apple Intelligence is now available to users. The latest Betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 have brought a subset of AI features in the preliminary preview version. One of these features is present in Apple's browser, Safari.

The new feature in Safari this time is Summarize, which uses Apple Intelligence technology to provide a summary of the web page.

In Safari's Reader mode, users will find some new features this year. There is a table of contents feature for a page containing titles and subtitles. Reader is a place where a summary of the pages supported by Apple Intelligence is present.

When it opens the Reader display on iOS 18.1, there will be a new "Summarize" button at the top flanked by the Apple Intelligence logo.

Press the button, and animation will appear to scan page content with purple light from Apple Intelligence. In the test, this scan only takes one or two seconds. The summary is provided very quickly on each device used, including the iPad Pro M4, iPhone 15 Pro, and even the MacBook Air M1 from 2020.

Once the scan is complete, a summary of the page will be available soon. On iPhone, you will see a summary at the top of the page, while on iPad and Mac, a summary is displayed on the Sidebar.

This Safari summary is quite intelligent and helps in early use. This early beta version will definitely improve over time, but it's very useful.

By embedding a summary into Safari's Reader mode, Apple basically limits how many people are really going to use it. Safari summary is not automatic and is not available on normal website views. You should open Reader before getting an option for summary. Even after that, you should request a summary manually every time.

In the upcoming version, it might be nice if the summary can be seen outside Reader mode. It would be great to have a special summary button in Safari's toolbar.

A Surprising Apple Intelligence Feature

When Apple first introduced Apple Intelligence in June, Safari was not widely discussed. New features such as site summary are described, but not as part of Apple Intelligence's story.

Now that the first beta is out, it seems that Apple Intelligence does support the Safari summary. Apple Intelligence's logo is used, and its interface works very similarly to the summary available with new AI writing tools.

It's not clear what that means for users without devices supporting Apple Intelligence, or if this is going to change during the beta cycle. According to Apple's iOS 18 website, the Safari summary will be available to all users, not only those with AI devices. Maybe one Apple Intelligence feature, at least, will be present on more iPhones, iPads, and Macs.