On Monday, Apple announced a new Safari feature called Highlights for iOS 18, which uses machine learning to generate summaries and isolate other helpful information about a webpage.
Safari 18 introduces a new Highlights feature which can summarize articles and provide key info about a page
According to Apple, Safari's new Highlights feature can provide users with useful page information as they browse. This includes things like article summaries, directions, and quick links.
Safari Highlights was originally titled "Intelligent Search" during its development period. The feature was discovered by AppleInsider in our exclusive report on Safari 18, months ahead of release.
With Highlights, users will be able to quickly learn and obtain relevant information about people, music, movies, TV shows, and locations.
When planning a trip, for instance, users will be able to get the most relevant details about a location. This can include the phone number and address of a hotel the user might be interested in.
According to Apple, Users will have the option to play an artist's music from Highlights or receive details about a TV show or movie.
Safari 18 also features a redesigned Reader view, which includes an AI-generated table of contents as well as summaries of news articles. The same types of summaries will also be available within the Highlights UI inside Safari.
Safari 18 features a redesigned Reader view with an AI-generated table of contents, as well as a summary of the webpage
As we revealed in our exclusive report on Apple's Project BlackPearl, the company's AI software is capable of generating summaries consisting of exactly three sentences. It appears that Safari 18 will utilize this type of summarization for Highlights and the new Reader view.
Safari 18 also features a new Viewer mode, which immediately detects video on a page - and offers the option to move the video to Picture-in-Picture or switch to fullscreen mode.
Notably absent from the new version of Safari is Apple's in-house content blocker called Web Eraser. Apple apparently scrapped the feature ahead of release, likely due to pressure and complaints from the UK's News Media Association as well as a group of French publishers.
The AI-enhanced Safari browser is only one of many updates within the new operating systems Apple announced on Monday. At its annual WWDC, the company announced iOS 18, iPadOS 18 as well as macOS Sequoia.