Using Apple Intelligence Rewriting Tools

With Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.1 you can use proofreading and writing tools to improve your emails, messages, notes and other documents.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the Apple Intelligence writing tools. 
A new feature in macOS Sequoia 15.1 is the ability to use a set of Apple Intelligence tools to improve your writing. As an example here I've written this intentionally bad paragraph in the Mail App. I can use the Apple Intelligence tools to improve it. You want to make sure, of course, that in System Settings under Apple Intelligence you've enabled Apple Intelligence. 
Now you can access the writing tools in a variety of different ways. First you want to select the text that you want rewritten. Then you can Control Click, two-finger click, or right click on the text. You'll see here under Writing Tools the writing tools here. Proofread, Rewrite, Make Friendly, Make Professional, and Make Concise. You also see an option here to Show Writing Tools which will just bring up the options in another format. Also notice here in Mail, I've got this little indicator here to the left. I can click on that and it will bring up the tools. I can also, with text selected, click here at the top of the Toolbar in Mail and it will bring up those same tools. You also have these options under Edit. If you go to Writing Tools you'll see them there. This is handy because you could set keyboard shortcuts for these since they are in the Menu Bar. 
Some apps won't have all of these. For instance here in Pages, if I select this text there is nothing here in the Toolbar. I won't see the little indicator here to the left. But I can still access the Writing Tools in the Edit Menu or use the Context Menu and get to them from there. I expect Apple will be updating Pages and other apps at some point to add the other buttons. But for now know that you can get to the tools this way in a variety of different situations, like for instance when filling out a form in Safari or when using some third party app or you're writing text. 
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Now, as I said, this is an intentionally poorly written paragraph. So let's try to use these tools. I'm actually going to make things even worse by changing something right here. You can see I'm using a and the plural here. You sometimes get that when you're kind of working on a sentence and you don't realize when you've made one change you forgot to make the other. So, this would be an ideal place where the Proofread option would work really well. Let's bring up the Apple Intelligence Writing Tools here and let's use Proofread. You can see it did catch that mistake and make the change. So that's very useful even if you don't want your text rewritten using the Proofreading tools can avoid embarrassing mistakes. 
Let's say now we want to rewrite this and make it better. Let's got and use the Writing Tools. I'll click this button up here this time and let's just use the Rewrite Button here. When I use that you can see it is rewritten it. You can see it has done it in a much more formal style, probably recognizing that this is kind of a business email and has rewritten things to make it a lot better. You can easily use this button here to switch to the original and then back again to compare the two. You can see the new version is indeed much better. But if you want to revert you can click this button right here. You can also click this button to have it Rewrite again. So maybe if it did a decent job but you want it to be even better you can do additional rewrite on this new text. You can Dismiss this little control here with Done and now you've kept that text. But you can still use Command Z to Undo. 
Of course you may have notice there are other styles as well. Let's, instead of using Rewrite let's use Professional which is something we may want in this case. You can see here it is going to rewrite it in a very professional style. It's actually going to even divide it up into multiple paragraphs making it easier to read and probably more likely that somebody would actually read this email when it is not all grouped together like that. Let's Revert. Now let's choose the Friendly style here. You may think that that's not what is needed here but actually the Friendly style is still an improvement over the original and may be suitable in some situations. Like maybe if you know the person you're sending this email to or you just know the company is very casual. Let's try the Concise style which should produce fewer words than the original. So you can see it indeed does and it still improves on the text. 
Now it may seem that that's all you've got. You've got basically four options for rewriting text. But you can combine these. So, for instance, let's go here and make this the Professional Style and then when we're done with that let's go and choose Concise. So we're combining two of these. You can also go Professional and then Friendly or maybe Friendly and Professional. You can just try different combinations and read the text until you get what you want. Another thing to consider is you don't need to rewrite everything. For instance if you think you like most of what you've written but you think maybe this one sentence could be better you could just select that one sentence and then go and rewrite that using one of these three options or the main Rewrite option. Then you can see if that works out better for you. 
So far this is all pretty quick and easy to do. You may just want to go with that. But, if you really want to get the best version of something you may actually want to see what the Rewrite Tools produce  and then use those as suggestions to edit your original text or combine the two. So may want to take text like this and Copy and then Paste here. So I've got two copies of it. Then maybe go in and let's try the Rewrite option. Now with these two versions go through and take the suggestions from the second version and incorporate them into your first. Or perhaps look at the second version and see where maybe the language isn't quite what you would use. You've got your original here so maybe incorporate parts of that into the rewritten part. It really depends on how much effort you want to put into it. Remember that these are tools for you to use not a quick way to having your computer do your work for you. So use them to make your writing better, especially in situations like this email, but don't rely on them to just do the work for you. At the very least read the text that is produced to make sure it isn't changing the meaning of what you're trying to say. For instance in this text the last sentence here of the rewritten portion seems to assume that I'm including some sort of application where I'm actually not doing that here. I'm just sending an introduction email. Even if you don't like the idea of using this it is worth sometimes just trying out to see what is produced. Sometimes there may just be like one word or one way that something is phrased that you may adopt back into your original or maybe use the next time that you write something.
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 15 Responses to “Using Apple Intelligence Rewriting Tools”

Jim

2 months ago

Hey Gary...I assume that the tools Apple Intelligence offers is only good in Mac mail. I tried it in my Outlook mail and it doesn't seem to work.
Is that correct?
Thanks, Jim

Gary Rosenzweig

Jim: Depends what you mean. You can use the Mac Mail app with an Outlook email account. If you access Outlook email in a web browser, you should be able to use text tools there, though the Outlook website may be doing its own thing when it comes to text input, maybe? If you mean you are using an Outlook app, then I'm not sure what that supports. If they are using macOS text fields, then it should work. But maybe they are not.

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Chris

Apple Intelligence Writing Tools seem to be at an early stage of development targeted at short simple items, such as emails. My first test on a paragraph from a research paper created problems. Applying Proofread> Replace in Pages removed all character styles, including the text style of footnote references. In MS Word, Proofread> Replace went farther and replaced footnote references with spaces that Proofread would not remove.
I look forward to your coverage of Writing Tools as they evolve.

Eugenia Burkes

I can us AI in mail but not pages. Why?

Eugenia: Which methods did you try? For instance did you select text and then right+click on the text selection and then choose Writing Tools?

I'll give this a try. I was looking for the symbol in the tool bar.

Fran

Is it correct that AI doesn't work with Microsoft Word on your Mac?
And, it only works in Mail, Notes and Pages?

Eugenia: Right at 1:25 I talk about the fact that Pages doesn't have a button in the toolbar.

Fran: It works in Word. Just tried it. Select the text in Word, bring up the context menu, select Writing Tools.

Lucy

Apple intelligence is not available in Canadian English? I am in Canada. If so, disappointed

Lucy: Coming in December. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/121115

Bob Kunes

1 month ago

Gary, Love your episodes and have been a modest Patreon supporter for years. Our church posts teachings online and Apple Podcast automatically transcribes the text. I would like to see if Apple Intelligence can help me copy and paste the transcribed text. I find I can only copy about 10 lines at the time of the transcribed text.

Bob: So you are uploading your podcast, waiting for it to appear in the Apple Podcasts app, and then grabbing the transcript from there? Why not just take the original audio file and transcribe that. You can do it in the Notes app for instance. Like I show here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/111936784

Pete

4 weeks ago

In case others are wondering, if you have an Intel i5 processor, Apple Intelligence will not work on your computer. After trying to get this feature running on my iMac, despite having updated to Sequoia 15.1, there is no option for it because Apple will not make it available to and is leaving behind those of us who do not have the M_ processor.

Using Apple Intelligence Rewriting Tools

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