Apple has made it clear that even the best Apple Watch models, from the Series 10 to the Ultra 2, won’t support most of the forthcoming Apple Intelligence features. This is most likely due to onboard processing limitations. There is, however, one bit of Apple Intelligence that’s an exception, and that’s Notification Summaries.
This AI-backed feature is set to debut with the roll-out of iOS 18.1, which could come as early as next week. However, if you’re eager to try it now, the iOS 18.1 public beta came out in September and includes the notification summary feature. The catch is that even though this feature will appear on Apple Watches, you're still going to need to have an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence to use it. Supported models include all the latest iPhone 16 models, the iPhone 15 Pro and the 15 Pro Max.
The idea is that when you receive a notification on your Apple device, rather than only seeing the first few lines of the text or email, you’ll instead get a summary of the message's contents, making it easier to parse important information with just a glance.
Apple is using its AI-backed language tool for text analysis here — other features like suggested replies use it, too — with all the processing happening on your smartphone. However, a paired Apple Watch would benefits from these Notification Summaries. And in a lot of ways, these short, sweet summaries are particularly well-suited for the Apple Watch’s comparably smaller display.
Notification Summaries can also tackle the dreaded meandering text message thread, summing up the key points and saving you the hassle of scrolling through the weeds.
It’s not just emails and messages that get the summarizing treatment, you can set up Apple Intelligence to analyze and condense notifications from all of your apps.
This is, of course, just one of several new Apple Intelligence features coming to your iPhone via iOS 18.1. Others include AI writing tools, phone call recordings that can be transcribed and summarized and a new Clean Up tool for removing unwanted objects/subjects from images. However, those features won't be available on the Apple Watch.
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