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iOS 18: How to Use Safari's New Highlights Feature

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Safari in iOS 18 introduces a new feature called Highlights, which is designed to enhance your browsing experience by intelligently surfacing key information from webpages. The tool uses machine learning to identify and extract the most relevant details, and present them to you in an easily accessible format.

safari-icon-blue-banner.jpeg

Think of Highlights as a kind of smart assistant within Safari, saving you time and effort by eliminating the need to manually search through lengthy web content. Whether you're looking up a restaurant, researching a historical figure, or checking out a new movie, Highlights can often quickly provide the essential information you need.

The feature is particularly useful for various types of content:
  • For businesses and locations, it can display address details, operating hours, and quick access to directions.
  • When browsing pages about people, it might show brief biographical information.
  • For entertainment content, it can offer direct links to play songs or summarize reviews for movies and TV shows.
Highlights aims to streamline your browsing by providing these bite-sized pieces of information right when you need them.

ios-18-safari-highlights.jpg

Here's how to use the new feature in iOS 18:
  1. Open Safari and navigate to a supported webpage.
  2. Look for a purple sparkle over the tool icon in the browser bar. This indicates Highlights are available.
  3. Tap the sparkle to open the Highlights window.
  4. Review the summarized information presented in the Highlights window, and interact with the information you need, such as tapping on directions or playback links.
By keeping an eye out for the sparkle icon as you browse, you can take full advantage of this time-saving feature and quickly access the most pertinent information from websites. Note that Highlights is currently only available in the U.S. and only works for English websites.

Article Link: iOS 18: How to Use Safari's New Highlights Feature
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/use-safari-highlights-feature-ios/
I got it to do it on a wikipedia page. I didn't see any purple sparkle, instead I saw the little AI stars on the tool icon to the left of the URL. I noticed you can either tap or press and hold. Tap shows the summary, press and hold brings up reader with the summary at the top.
 
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This worked on the base domain, macrumors.com. Wasn’t particular useful there, but that’s okay. I honestly only see myself using this for horrible ad driven pages like journalism websites, and not much else.

Maybe restaurants due to their often minimal effort into the UX on their sites, but I really just want to find restaurants on Apple Maps with a menu view that shows photos of each item, the interior, and in app reviews (in contrast with the current yelp abomination).

Other than that, I prefer the web to be as the webpage creator makes it. Their freedom drives innovation on the browser which is a good thing overall.
 
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AppleTree01 said:
This worked on the base domain, macrumors.com. Wasn’t particular useful there, but that’s okay.
Click to expand...
a little less than useful... ;)

"While the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 are models from last year, Apple today announced that it plans to bring several new features to these two devices specifically via a software update. The new features include sleep apnea detection, a new Tides app, and a new Depth app. The sleep apnea detection feature will allow users to monitor their sleep and detect if they have sleep apnea."
 
trip1ex said:
a little less than useful... ;)

"While the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 are models from last year, Apple today announced that it plans to bring several new features to these two devices specifically via a software update. The new features include sleep apnea detection, a new Tides app, and a new Depth app. The sleep apnea detection feature will allow users to monitor their sleep and detect if they have sleep apnea."
Click to expand...

I have the Tides app on my Series 6.
 
I guess all the comments saying "it didn't work here" means that it'll be a while before Safari catches up to other browsers that have summarization features, huh? 🙃
 
I don't like using the new Highlights feature in Safari because the AI is too flaky. It doesn't work consistently, and when it does work, the results are often inaccurate or incomplete.

(i didn't even mention Safari nor Highlights so that's bonus points for Chrome AI writing my comment.)
 
maerz001 said:
Now let’s use AI to extract from AI written webpages. What could go wrong?:)
Click to expand...
This is client side, but yep it’s a valid concern! Hopefully there will be standardised tags/markup to signify server side AI content is machine generated. Without that the web will turn into some kind of self referencing nonsense soup, not that it isn’t close to that already.
 
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Running 18.1 beta, there are tons more web pages that use highlights/summary. I'm not ever sure this function is active in 18.0. I've gotten a few "summaries" in 18.0, but they don't have nearly the useful information as in 18.1.
 
If this requires web page designers and content creators to code their pages so it works with this feature, this feature is dead on arrival.
 
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Some commenters seem to be confusing "summary" with highlight. This article is about highlights - from apple.com "Safari will automatically detect relevant information on a page and highlight it as you browse. Highlights display helpful information like directions and quick links to learn more about people, music, movies, and TV shows." The example given in the article does work. It "highlights" the location of the hotel. As you can see in the screen capture I just did on 15.1 beta4.
 

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trip1ex said:
I don't like using the new Highlights feature in Safari because the AI is too flaky. It doesn't work consistently, and when it does work, the results are often inaccurate or incomplete.

(i didn't even mention Safari nor Highlights so that's bonus points for Chrome AI writing my comment.)
Click to expand...
It said using on device logic not the upcoming AI.

By the way, anyone could share a website in which Safari highlights is working?
 
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