“Intelligent” answers in Apple Mail: This is how you can be switched off

For Apple Intelligence there is actually a very large main switch under MacOS who controls everything that belongs to Apple’s AI system. It can be found in the system settings under “Apple Intelligence & Siri” and determined whether tools such as the writing tools or the two image generators genemoji and image Playground can be used system -wide. However, there are also switches in the individual apps themselves to control different AI functions. For example, in the news app and in Apple Mail you can deactivate the summaries that automatically appear as a preview. But so -called intelligent answers, also called Smart Reply in English, do not seem to be turned off with active Apple Intelligence. As a closer look at the system settings shows, this is possible.

Well -hidden function

With active Apple Intelligence, intelligent answers always appear when you answer an email or go into the text field of the message app. This can be annoying: Firstly, the smart replies are not always suitable, so not really intelligent, because Apple’s AI system does not understand correctly, secondly, block the regular input field (see screenshot from Apple Mail) and must first click away. If you want to keep the various Apple intelligence tools, but only turn off the intelligent answers, you have to look for something.

Apple has hidden the possibility in the area of keyboard, not at Apple Intelligence. If you click on “Edit” next to “Entering sources” in the system settings, you will find a switch with the inscription “Show suggested answers”. If you turn it off, the intelligent answers no longer appear, while the rest of Apple Intelligence is still available.

Alternative: screen time

One wonders why Apple has not integrated the possibility of deactivating the intelligent answers into the individual apps, where you can already control the summaries. But the group apparently said that this better fits into the keyboard settings, where, among other things, the use of the spelling check or the automatic typographical punctuation can also be determined.

Alternatively, it would also be possible to turn off the writing tools as a whole. However, this is only possible via Apple’s screen time function, which is usually not used as a normal user with all rights. This switch is also difficult to find, there is no reference from the Apple intelligence settings menu. In addition, you then lose all writing tools and not just the “intelligent” answers.