Apple Mail in iOS 18 is set to receive substantial improvements powered by new AI capabilities, including more powerful search, generative "Smart Replies," and email composition assistance.
According to a new report from AppleInsider, results returned when performing a Mail search will be beefed up to include additional information from Contacts, locations, and locally stored documents.
Meanwhile, "Smart Replies" will rely on Apple's on-device large-language model (LLM), internally known as Ajax. Combined with Siri's deep integration with Mail and the virtual assistant's ability to create replies on the fly at the user's request, Smart Replies are being developed to streamline communication and save time.
Associated with the new Mail features is a new system-wide writing tools framework that could enable text editing via Siri. The framework is apparently included in pre-release versions of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15.
Although little is known about its implementation, the report claims that it could help change the style or tone of the user's text as they type an email or message. If a user wanted to sound less casual, for example, they could ask Siri to "Make this text more professional."
The report offers a number of other tidbits related to "Project BlackPearl" – Apple's codename for some cross-system AI and machine learning enhancements – including automatic email categorization based on content (e.g. time sensitivity), ability to summarize emails and email threads, as well as notification summaries based on topic.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has previously touched on many of the other rumored new AI features mentioned in the report that are coming to iOS 18 and macOS 15. You can find more details about them in our previous coverage.
