Using Apple Intelligence To Summarize Text

You can use Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.1 to summarize text in articles, entire web pages and documents. You can also extract key points, lists and tables.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the Apple Intelligence summarizing tools. 
One of the first Apple Intelligence features that we got in macOS 15.1 is the ability to summarize text. This is grouped together with the other writing tools that I have covered before. So, for instance, say you're on a webpage like this and there is a section here that you want to summarize. So let's say this section here. You can select it and with text selected you can bring up the Apple Intelligence tools. Now in some apps there is a button in the Tool Bar. But not here in Safari. Here in Safari though you can get to the Apple Intelligence tools in the Edit Menu and look for Writing Tools. They are all right here. 
You can choose show Writing Tools to bring up all of the tools or go directly to one of the tools by choosing one of these options. But you can also get to this by selecting text and then Control Clicking, two-finger clicking on the trackpad, or right clicking on the mouse, and then in the Context Menu you can also choose Writing Tools. So I'm going to choose Show Writing Tools in this case and it brings these up. 
Now a lot of these are indeed writing tools. Tools for you to use when you are writing text and you want to make it more friendly, professional, concise, or just have it proofread. But there is also a group down here of items that is meant for text, perhaps, that you didn't write although you certainly could use them for text that you did write. So, for instance, I can choose Summary right here and it is going to summarize the text that is selected. So you can see here it just summarizes it all into one simpler paragraph. 
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Now note that if your goal was to summarize the entire webpage you don't necessarily need to select everything on the page and then use that tool. Because in Safari you've got Apple Intelligence tools right here in the Address Bar. Click on this little icon to the left. It should bring up a summary of the article. That's if it can find text on the page that represents an article. So you can see here it gives you this concise summary of the entire page there. So if that's what you want you don't have to go Writing Tools. You can just get to it here in the Safari Address Bar. 
In addition to Safari you'll also find summaries in Mail. Sometimes you'll find summaries here on the left in the Previews for each message. But you'll also find them if you scroll down and look for the Summarize Button at the top of some of your messages. You can click that and it will summarize the entire message like that. Also if you go into System Settings, note that of course you need to have Apple Intelligence turned On in the Apple Intelligence section. But also in Notifications you have the option to have Previews for Notifications summarized and you can set it on a per app basis. Which ones get summaries inside of those notification previews. So, you might get a long message from somebody and the notification, instead of showing you the first few words, would actually summarize the message. 
Now outside of the web you can use this pretty much anywhere you can select text. So here I've got a PDF. It's a report maybe somebody has given you and it is a rather long rambling report. If you want to summarize this you can select all the text, I'm just going to use Command A to do that, and you could find the Writing Tools in the Edit Menu or by Control Clicking and here I can go to Writing Tools and Summarize and get a summary of this report, like that. You can just read it right here but you can also Copy it to the Clipboard if you want. 
Now you may have already noticed that there are more tools there than just a basic summary. So let's go back into Writing Tools here and I can see here I've got Create Key Points, Make A List, and Make a Table. If you go into Show Writing Tools you'll see all of those right here as well. So it is in the summary here it might be good to get Key Points for this. Let's try that. So you can see here it's filled in all of these bullet items here and it has given you a longer piece of text than the summary but perhaps it is just as easy to read and it gives you more information while not being much more complex.  You can see it is still so much shorter than the full report. 
Now if you try to use some of these other tools you're going to get mixed results based on what you have selected. So in this case if we choose Make List here we'll get a fairly decent list that summarizes the report. So you can see here it is much longer than the Key Points. It's putting almost everything in there. But it is doing it as a bullet list instead of these paragraphs. So it really depends on your source material as to which one is going to be more useful to you. 
Now there is another option here called Make Table. Now it is not going to work for all content. Here it actually tries to come up with some decent content in a table format. So whether or not this works for this kind of report you're going to have to judge. This is just some example text here so it is hard to say whether this is any good. But it is interesting as a way to summarize things. Maybe if you enjoy looking at tables more than reading many paragraphs of text this might work for you.
You can use Make Table in a more obvious way. For instance, here's some text showing somebody's shopping trip. Maybe they dictated this into their phone. You can select all of this and you can pretty much predict what you're going to get if you use Make Table here. It's going to take the item and the prices and put them into two columns like this. Here's an interesting one. Here's some text showing the amount of miles driven in a day. But just as regular text. Let's use the Writing Tools to make this a Table. Here it's only going to find the day number and the number of miles. But what if this was a little different. Here the mode of transportation has changed. So there is actually more data on each line. So now let's use Writing Tools to make a Table from this. We'll see, yes, it correctly figures out that there should be an activity column and puts the right thing in there. 
Here's another example. Here is some text, maybe something somebody wrote or dictated or it is from a story or something. It would be interesting to put this in a table. Sure enough, if you choose Writing Tools and Make Table, we can see that it does figure out the Breed and then a Description based on it. So it puts together a little table like this. If we were to, instead, choose Make List then we'll get a list here based on this and you could see it breaks it down with the relevant information. It gets that there is more than just the name of a dog breed here. There is actually some more information and puts it in this nice bullet list. 
Here's another example. Here is some food items and an amount for each one. But the amounts use very different measurements. So let's go and use Writing Tools here and see if it can put this in a Table. Indeed it does! It lists the quantity in whatever units are provided there. 
So the secret for using Apple Intelligence right now is the same as the secret for using any large language model artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT. Experimentation. You need to experiment and try different things. Everything I showed you in this video I figured out by just experimenting. By putting different types of information into documents and trying to use the different tools there to see what results were produced. You've got to do the same thing with whatever content you deal with. Whatever you read. Whatever reports you may get. Whatever things you write. You need to try all of these different tools. See what kind of results are generated right now. If something doesn't produce results right now but you think it may be useful don't forget to try it again in a few months because things are always moving forward. A lot of this is going to be updated in each version of macOS. We're also going to be getting the ability to use ChatGPT to augment Apple Intelligence. So something that doesn't work now may work great in six months. That's exactly what has happened with tools like ChatGPT over the last couple of years. In the next version of macOS, version 15.2 we're going to get the ability to tie in ChatGPT to this. So you're going to be able to use prompts to actually summarize things. So instead of just a summary you can ask for something very specific, like explaining something at a certain level or looking for a certain detail in a list. 
So there's a look at the first summarization tools for Apple Intelligence. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Using Apple Intelligence To Summarize Text”

Art Busbey

3 months ago

I very much enjoyed this, especially your 'terminal' admonition to experiment. I have tried convincing students and other faculty this very strategy for years and, unfortunately, few seem willing to do this. Many are so terrified of learning something new (perhaps a left over of learning other operating systems) that they just want to stick only what they have done for 20 years. Again - nice to hear someone else recommending this time-honored technique of learning the new.

Geoff Ralph

Hi Gary, thanks for your videos. Any idea why the ability to use Apple Intelligence when we use English (U.K.).?

Sorry I should have said why is this particular feature denied to those who use English U.K.? Is it a legal issue in the U.K.?

Gary Rosenzweig

Geoff: It just takes time to deploy features across multiple languages and regions. To get the words right, adhere to rules, build infrastructure, etc.

Geoff

Thanks Gary.