Let AI summarize, analyze and draft replies
Four features sit above your conversations. Summary reads every unread chat across WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and Messenger and tells you which ones need a reply. Analyze takes the thread you have open, condenses it, and files what was in it into Calendar and Reminders. Smart Reply writes three drafts and you pick one. Skill writes that draft from an entry in your own library instead of a generic one.
They are built to be used in a row rather than one at a time. Tapping a Summary card opens that conversation, so a single pass through the app takes you from an unread chat to a finished draft. The three clips below show that pass, cut from one continuous take. Skill is the fourth, above the keyboard beside Analyze and Smart Reply, and it closes the chapter.
Summary — which chats need you
Open the Summary glyph at the top of your conversation list and the app reads every chat with something unread in it — across WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and Messenger at once — and writes you a card per conversation.
What happens when you open it
- The header counts the work. How many unread, across how many chats — the two numbers the sheet prints before it has summarised anything.
- Cards stream in as they finish. Every unread conversation is summarised at the same time, and each card lands in place the moment its own summary is done — busiest chat first. Nothing re-sorts under your thumb while you are reading.
- Then the list splits in two. When the sweep finishes, the cards settle into Needs Reply and FYI. That is the whole point of the screen: not thirty-one messages, but the three that are actually waiting on you.
- Tap a card to go there. The sheet closes and that conversation opens, which is where the next two features live.
How it decides something needs a reply
A chat lands in Needs Reply when an unread message in it asks you to do something — a request, a question, or something flagged urgent — or when a high-priority reminder was pulled out of it. Everything else is FYI. It reads up to 60 unread messages per conversation, which is the budget that keeps a long group chat from crowding out the rest of the sweep.
Not the same as Day Summary
Summary is this sheet, across every unread chat. Day Summary is a card inside one conversation: it condenses that day’s messages into key points, with the events and reminders mentioned during the day as cards underneath, and collapses to a single row so it can sit above the thread without burying it. It is the one to reach for on a group that has been talking all day.
Analyze — keep what the thread contained
Analyze sits above the keyboard once a conversation has at least three messages from the other side. It condenses the thread you are in — and then does the part that lasts: the time in it becomes a calendar event, the thing you promised becomes a reminder. Each one is a card — tap it, pick which calendar or which list, and it is filed.
Choose what you want out of it
Four types are always in the picker:
Seven more are specialised, and at most two of them are ever added — the two the thread matches best, placed above the four rather than after them. A thread that is mostly prices and orders gets Purchase Tracker; a thread with two questions nobody answered gets Unanswered Questions. The match is made from tags the app has already put on the messages, so a thread it has not tagged yet shows you the four and nothing else.
Picking a type fills an Analysis Instructions field beneath the picker with that type’s own prompt, and you can edit it. What you write is kept per type, so a change to Quick Summary is still there the next time you pick Quick Summary. Custom Prompt is the same field with nothing in it — which is why it is the one type where Generate stays greyed out until you write something.
Narrow it before you run it
Under that, Filter Options set a date range, restrict it to incoming messages only, and cap how many messages it reads at 20, 50 or 100. Useful on a group that has been running for a year when you only care about this week.
What comes back
The summary streams in line by line, then Detected Events and Detected Reminders underneath it — each with its own Add to Calendar or Add to Reminders button that flips to a confirmation once it is filed. Copy, Share and Regenerate sit between the summary and the cards — Regenerate hands you back the picker and the filters rather than running the same thing again. Nothing is written to Calendar or Reminders unless you tap the card.
Why bullet points aren’t the same thing
WhatsApp can summarise your unread messages into text. Text is where it stops — nothing to tap, nothing written anywhere, and it is gone the moment you close the chat. The durable half is not the summary. It is what happens to the summary afterwards, and that needs a path into Calendar and Reminders that a messaging app does not have.
Smart Reply — three drafts, not one guess
The first of the three buttons above the keyboard. It reads the conversation and hands you three complete replies to choose between.
Say what it should reply to
Pressing Smart Reply puts the thread into selection mode with the latest incoming message already ticked. Tick the earlier messages the answer depends on, leave the rest unticked, and press Generate. The button counts what you picked, so you can see how much of the thread it is about to read.
This matters most in a group. A work group or a family chat collects a lot of messages that have nothing to do with the one you are answering, and a reply written from all of them will bring some of that in. Picking the three or four messages that are actually the question gives the model the conversation you mean. Cancel leaves selection mode without generating anything.
Three different answers, not three wordings of one
This is the part worth knowing. The three drafts are not a polite version, a casual version and a short version of the same reply — each one is tagged with a different intent, meaning what the reply actually does. So you are choosing between accepting, proposing something else, and asking a question first, which is the decision you were going to make anyway.
Each draft is one to three sentences, written from you to them, and tagged with the intent it took.
Then it is yours
Tap a draft and it lands in the composer with the caret live — not in the conversation. Edit it, run Apple's Writing Tools over it, or throw it away. It sends when you press send, and not before.
Skill — your own instruction, not a generic draft
The middle of the three buttons. Where Smart Reply writes from the conversation alone, Skill runs an entry from your library — your instructions, your tone settings, the tools you granted it and the documents you attached — against the thread you are in.
Pick an entry, add an instruction, say which messages it reads, and generate — it opens a chat with that Skill already loaded. The reply comes back as a Draft Message card you can keep talking to, rather than a take-it-or-leave-it list. It reads only the conversation you are in, never your inbox, and what it writes lands in the composer for you to edit before it goes anywhere.
Your library starts empty — you write an entry or import one. Skills & Tools has the two kinds, the four ways to create one, the tools a Skill can reach, and how to write one that works.
Which engine each one uses
Summary and Analyze are Apple Intelligence and nothing else — no key, no provider to pick, and no path to Claude. Smart Reply and Skill are the two you can point at Claude if you want to.
On your iPhone, or on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute when a sweep needs more room than the phone has. Either way it is Apple Intelligence, there is no key and nothing to configure, and it never goes to Claude.
The same two Apple tiers as Summary, and the same single toggle in Settings with no provider row beneath it. Claude is not an option here.
One of the two you can hand over. Settings → Chat → AI Features → Smart Reply switches it to Cloud AI, with its own model row.
The other. Settings → Chat → AI Features → Skill has the same provider picker and its own model row, and each entry in your library also carries the engine it drafts with.
“Apple Intelligence” covers two tiers, and the app moves between them for you: the foundation model on your iPhone, and Private Cloud Compute — the same stack on Apple silicon servers — when a turn needs more room than the phone has. There is no switch for it and no extra cost, and Apple meters it against your device's own allowance rather than ours.
On the Free plan, your first week is unlimited; after that Apple Intelligence actions are capped at 5 a day across all four of these plus AI Writer. Any paid plan makes them unlimited. More on choosing between the two engines, and on everything else the AI hands back as a card.
Message intelligence — questions, answered.
Yes, as part of an analysis rather than as a badge on each bubble. Run Analyze on a thread and pick Sentiment Analysis, and every message is classified with a sentiment (positive, negative, neutral, mixed, or question) and an intent (informational, request, social, urgent, or transactional), alongside an urgency score, a formality score and the topics it found.
The same classification is what Summary sorts on: a chat lands in Needs Reply rather than FYI because something in it was read as a request, a question, or urgent.
Dates and commitments, as cards you tap once to file.
A date, a time or a place — "dinner tomorrow at 7", "team standup Monday 10 am" — becomes an event card carrying the title, location, date range and notes, with Add to Calendar on it. Something you or somebody else promised becomes a reminder card, with owner, deadline and any blockers, and Add to Reminders pre-fills the deadline. Past events and overdue reminders are shown in red so you can tell at a glance.
Those cards appear in three places, and nowhere else: the Summary sheet, the Day Summary card inside a chat, and the result of running Analyze. They are not badges on individual message bubbles — nothing is extracted, and nothing is written to Calendar or Reminders, until you ask for one of those three and tap the card.
An action item it tracks can be pending, in progress, completed, blocked or cancelled.
Summary is the sheet on your conversation list: it sweeps every chat with something unread in it, across all four networks, and tells you which ones need you.
Day Summary is a card inside one chat. It condenses that day’s conversation into key points, with the events and reminders mentioned during the day as cards underneath, and collapses to a single row with a tap so it can sit above the thread without burying it. Use it to catch up on a group that has been talking all day without scrolling back through it.
Yes, through the AI rather than through the chat view. Ask the agent chat, or a Skill, about a number, email, company or job title somebody sent you, and it hands back a contact card — the extracted fields, with Add to Contacts on it, saved to your address book only when you tap.
It is one of the action cards, which the agent chapter lists in full. Analyze does not produce one: that sheet returns events and reminders.
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