Where Apple Intelligence is available, Beacon can summarise an article and answer questions about it. Both run on your device.
What it does
- Summarise an article. One sentence on what the piece reports, plus a few concrete points. If an article contains little detail, the summary stays brief rather than adding unsupported conclusions.
- Answer a question about an article. Grounded only in that article. If the article does not contain the answer, Beacon says so.
Both work on the whole article, not just the part on screen. Ask about something you scrolled past and Beacon still has it.
Where it runs
Beacon’s analysis runs locally using Apple’s on-device models.
The one exception is opt-in and described below.
Letting Siri read full articles
Beacon’s answers use one article and no outside knowledge. For comparisons or open-ended follow-ups, use the optional Siri setting below.
For the second kind of question, turn on Let Siri read full articles in Settings ▸ Reading. Beacon can then hand a whole article to Siri when you ask, so Siri’s own reasoning applies: open-ended follow-ups, comparisons, or carrying the piece into another app.
With it on, Apple Intelligence may process that request on Apple’s servers rather than on your device, under Apple’s terms. It is off until you turn it on, and Beacon’s own summaries and answers work either way.
Asking for it
Open an article and say ”Summarise this article in Beacon” or ”Ask about this article in Beacon”. Beacon tells the system which article you have open, so you do not have to name it. The same actions are available in the Shortcuts app as Summarise Article, Ask About Article and Get Article Text.
When it is not available
Apple Intelligence needs a supported device, and it has to be switched on in system settings. Where it is not available, Beacon does not offer these actions. Feeds, reading, saving, search and sync are unaffected. See Requirements.
A note on trust
Articles come from whoever publishes them. Beacon marks every piece of article text it passes to a model as content rather than instructions, so a page that contains text shaped like a command is treated as something to summarise, not something to obey. Quotes in an answer are checked against the article before being shown.