In all the excitement over Apple Intelligence, most of the focus has been on how Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform could revolutionize your iPhone and your Mac. Comparatively little attention has been directed towards its impact on the Apple Watch, but – as 9to5Mac has pointed out – a new feature in iOS 18.1 could help to change all that.
When Apple Intelligence was introduced at WWDC 2024 in June, one of the key features Apple highlighted was its ability to summarize your notifications for you – the idea being that you could get a fast round-up of everything you’d missed without having to trawl through a huge list of alerts. And it’s that AI feature that will really excel on all of the best Apple Watches.
Right now, Apple Watch notifications usually show the first part of a message, such as an email or an SMS text. But with Apple Intelligence, the notifications will instead summarize everything in the message in a few quick words. That makes it a lot faster to catch up on what’s going on, and it’s also better-suited to the Watch’s small screen.
This all makes a lot of sense for the Apple Watch because that device is designed for quick interactions. Being alerted when someone texts you or fires off an email in your direction is an area where Apple Intelligence summaries and the Apple Watch overlap very neatly indeed, and it suggests that this could become a key use case of Apple’s AI platform.
A nice little Apple Watch upgrade
One of the things I love most about my Apple Watch is how it enables me to leave my iPhone in my pocket. Instead of constantly rummaging for my iPhone every time I hear a buzz, I get important alerts sent to my wrist, which is a much faster and more convenient way to check up on alerts. With Apple Intelligence thrown into the mix, the whole experience should get even better.
This summary feature is all the more interesting because Apple Intelligence isn’t officially supported on the Apple Watch. Yet the way notifications work on the Apple Watch is that they are forwarded on from your iOS device. If your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence and you enable its summarization feature, notifications you receive on your Apple Watch will have already been given a dose of AI goodness before they land on your wrist, bypassing the lack of Apple Intelligence support on the Apple Watch.
Better yet, you don’t even need a shiny new Apple Watch to get Apple Intelligence summaries. As long as your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence – and right now that means it needs to be an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max – almost any Apple Watch will do.
While you can try out notification summaries right now as long as you have the required hardware and have downloaded the iOS 18 beta, it looks like a bunch of Apple Intelligence features could miss the iOS 18 launch date in September. Still, with alert summaries already out in beta and available on your wrist, Apple Watch fans might not need much else.
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