Beta for Apple Intelligence in Apple Mail
Apple Intelligence in 15.1 just flagged a phishing email as “Priority” and moved it to the top of my Inbox. This seems… bad
I’ve been trying to test the new features in Mail to make sure that they work properly with my apps, but Mail is not showing any categories or priority messages on my Mac. Based on this and on reports from other beta testers, I had thought that only iOS got the full Apple Intelligence features in the first beta.
(Maybe this has changed in beta 5, but it’s not available yet for me, and the release notes haven’t been updated yet. Apple’s announcement doesn’t say whether beta 5 is for the 15.0 track or the 15.1 track, and neither is showing an update right now. [Update: It seems that beta 5 is for 15.0.])
I do see the Summarize button, and it seems to work reasonably well, though I don’t really understand the use case for the feature. What kind of e-mails are important enough that I can’t skip them or quickly skim them, yet not important enough that I can trust an AI summary to be accurate and complete? Maybe I would be more likely to use the summary instead of skimming if it didn’t require an extra click.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-19): Cabel Sasser:
In a hilarious follow-up, my dad forwarded me a phishing email just to check with me if it was legitimate. I wrote back and said “Definitely not!”. He wrote back and explained, “I got suspicious.”
This is how Apple Intelligence summarized my dad’s email[…]
Update (2024-09-12): Cabel Sasser:
how does this help. i’m still opening the emails and the messages regardless of the summaries. in fact i’m MORE likely to open them more urgently, interrupting my work quicker, because the summaries can sometimes miss key information and i don’t want my brain to think i “read” them when i didn’t. the emails it prioritizes for me are often just emails about cancelled calendar events, already reflected on my calendar. so what is the… goal? to read my email less? how does this help that goal?
Apple Intelligence summaries are so bad. There have been so many situations when I was shocked or confused by the summary of an email or text and it’s because it was summarized incorrectly or unexpectedly. I know it’s early days, but I’m already losing faith in it all and at some point will end up just turning it off.
Update (2024-09-17): Adam Bell:
Man, I know it’s only a beta but summaries in Apple Intelligence really need more time in the oven.
SO many times will I get summaries that completely get things wrong and flip sentences around.
See also: Joe Kimberlin.
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I think the present Mail app on Sonora and on iOS and iPad has a memory leak. I have seen to many people complain about settings just disappearing. I just tell them to delete their present email and re-enter it to see if it resets the app.
The silliest thing about "Summarize" as an "Apple Intelligence" feature is that this has literally been a feature of Mac OS X since — I'm pretty sure — the very first version. In Sonoma, you have to turn it on (it's in the "Text" subsection of the Services section of the keyboard shortcuts dialog in Keyboard preferences?!), but it's there, and there's even a "Summary Service" app that comes up when you use this service!
And it's actually worked reasonably well since Mac OS X 10.0. I agree that it's kind of silly to use summarize on e-mails, but this is not a new feature and I'm actually expecting "Apple Intelligence" to make this feature worse now that it's highlighted as a top-level feature of Sequoia.
@Simone I assume it’s a different summarization engine, unless you think they are artificially holding back the feature from Intel Macs?
@Michael: Oh of course, Apple Intelligence is supposedly a new engine, but I just don’t get why it’s needed, when a “non-intelligent” summarize feature has existed for literal decades.
I fully expect Apple Intelligence to make it somewhat better in some niche use cases that are mainly splashy demos, but demonstrably worse for everything else including real-world situations.
Not sure I understand the question—are you saying that you don't receive mail that you know you don't have time for right now, possibly even for the foreseeable future, but that you wouldn't like at least a summary of? Newsletters?
I'm really looking forward to summary previews. This will definitely work for me.
@Sebby I get lots of newsletters that I only skim. Do you think a summary would be useful for those? I don’t think the summaries have any clickable links to the linked articles…nor do they list the headlines. So skimming seems better. Is there another category of messages where you think a summary would be helpful?
@Michael I guess it really depends on how good the summaries are, but I'd say it's often the case that even skimming is too much work when you're under some time pressure. "Netgear is hawking it's latest mesh lineup" is a lot easier than opening an email with lots of marketing copy and no clear direction of travel until you've already read most of it trying to work out what they're talking about. Newsletters where you might have time to drill down later would be easier to deal with if at least the substantial points of each article were summarised, instead of having to read the introductory blurb which will generally not tell you very much, and have to speculate about whether each section is worth reading. I guess we'll have to see how it works in practice. I think the big danger, as ever, is that the summary will leave out detail and end up wasting more time to read than would just reading the mail.
