The upcoming iOS 18 has a bunch of email-specific features. Or rather, it does if you use Apple’s email client, which apparently almost half of all email is opened with, and you can use the Apple Intelligence stuff. I honestly didn’t know it was bigger than Gmail. I hardly know how to reconcile that data with that fact that Windows is still vastly the most popular operating system 🤷♀️.
Nicole Merlin has a pretty good round up post.
Instead of grabbing the first few lines of the email to display in the inbox, Apple Mail will now show an AI-generated summary of the email instead.
Mail, Messages, Slack and other messaging apps will all show the AI summaries when displayed as a notification on the lock screen as well.
After opening an email, a ‘Summarize’ option will now be shown at the top of the message. Tapping this will trigger an AI-generated summary to be displayed for that message.
Gmail first introduced ‘tabs’ to the inbox back in 2013, and more than a decade later, Apple is following suit by adding them to the inbox in the Mail app. All incoming mail will be categorized into one of these tabs.
The categorizations and summaries are looking pretty suspect 😬.
The new Digest View groups messages from a single sender into a unified view to make them easier to locate and scan.
… one major thing that stood out in the announcements was the fact that the inbox view very conspicuously shows BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) logos in the message list.
That is, pretty prominent color icons for all senders, which is an actual spec.
I imagine there will be writing helpers too, but that’s just not email-specific is “anywhere you write” specific.
I’ll probably give it all a whirl, with a rather skeptical eye, as I’m still not entirely over the idea that these LLMs were trained on human writers who were neither asked or compensated.
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