Apple Intelligence is now out in the wild to a small number of users in their beta programme. I got my hands on it and want to offer some thoughts as to what I think may be the biggest effect for news organisations in the short term: e-mails. 

Before we start, there are a few things important to know:

1. Apple Intelligence is personalised to the device, which means it’s running in the background, not constantly sending information to the cloud. This is important for security but as it’s limited to device compute power, it may have an impact on run time for any given action.

2. Apple Intelligence will not be launching in Europe any time soon because of privacy regulations; more here. 

3. To state the obvious: This is new therefore we don’t yet know how consumer behaviours can change. We can, however, make some educated guesses.

Prioritising e-mails

Apple’s algorithm will prioritise certain e-mails. This is likely from particular senders or for timeliness, such as the example below which shows an event the same night:

Why does this matter?

Because your e-mails may get lost or demoted if not recognised as important or timely.

Summarising e-mails

Benedict Evants posted these screenshots on Threads, which show the traditional preview of the first two lines of an e-mail being replaced by an AI summary. In his words: “OK, this is very cool.” 

In addition to the preview on lock screen and through the inbox, entire e-mails can be summarised. Through a single tap on the “Summarize” button in the top right, a short summary is generated.

Why does this matter? 

Because we lose control of what is put forward to the reader, and it decreases the likelihood of people reading long e-mails, which means fewer marketing and advertising views.

Web pages

New tools are also available in Safari. Below you will see a series of screenshots showing a recent article from this newsletter, now available on our Web site. 

By clicking the icon on the bottom left, you get a range of options. “Listen to page” and “Show reader” are not new, but they are more prominent.

There are a few extra features, including translation tools to a preferred language (my Dutch is terrible in case you were wondering). There is also a summarisation tool, as you can see on the two screens to the right. I needed to go into Reader view to get the summary option, but I don’t know whether this is standard practice or a bug.

If you look at this in the context below, you’ll see just how much an experience changes from long text to a short overview:

Why does this matter?

Again, by content being summarised, news organisations lose control of their content and readers may see less advertising — although an optimist view may say our content is more widely available as listening tools and translation tools are more widely built in.

Writing tools

If you want to use some text you see on a Web site, you can now do different things with it. For example, in my previous article, if you wanted to share the main points with colleagues but not the whole thing, you could choose “key points.” Or if my text is a little lengthy, you can make it more concise. 

Below are screenshots showing various responses from the same highlighted text:

There is also a sharing tool in there which enables text to be shared to the usable customisable list (text messages, social etc). However when shared, there is no attribution.

Why does this matter?

While I don’t see a huge impact right now, this is a handy tool to take meaningful quotes/pieces of information. It’s a real shame attribution/link to source aren’t included.

Conclusion

The features in Apple Intelligence replicate many of the features that news organisations are already starting to work on — summarisation, text to speech. However this is being done at a platform level, making it easier for consumers but meaning news organisations have less control over how their content is consumed. 

We won’t know the real impact until this is full out in the wild, which may take some time.

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