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Deep dive into Extracting key points from book pages

Digitizing insights from physical books just became effortless. The new Book Points AI shortcut uses Apple Intelligence to transform photos of book pages into concise, meaningful notes. This feature solves the problem of manually transcribing quotes and summaries, allowing you to quickly capture the essence of what you're reading and save it directly to your notes.

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What's new

This release introduces the Book Points AI shortcut, a powerful workflow that streamlines the process of capturing information from physical books. When you run the shortcut, you can select multiple photos of book pages. The shortcut then uses the built-in Extract Text from Image action for each photo and sends the combined text to Apple Intelligence. A custom prompt instructs the AI to pull out the most meaningful quotes and key points, which are then automatically appended to a designated note in your Apple Notes app.

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How to use this feature

  1. Take clear photos of the book pages you want to summarize.
  2. Open the Shortcuts app and run the Book Points AI shortcut.
  3. From the photo picker that appears, select the images of the pages you captured.
  4. The shortcut will process the images, extract the text, and use AI to generate a summary of key points.
  5. Once complete, the extracted quotes and points will be automatically added to your specified note in Apple Notes.
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Key capabilities

  • Bulk Processing: Select and process multiple photos of book pages in a single run.
  • Intelligent Summarization: Utilizes Apple's Private Cloud Compute model to analyze text and pull out the most significant quotes and ideas, not just a simple text dump.
  • Automated Note Taking: Appends the extracted information directly to a specific note, creating a running log of your reading highlights without manual copy-pasting.
  • Customizable Prompts: You can edit the shortcut's prompt to tailor the output, such as asking for a single-paragraph summary, bullet points, or specific themes.

Tips for getting the most out of this feature

For best results, ensure the photos of your book pages are well-lit and the text is in sharp focus. Before using the shortcut for the first time, you may want to edit the Append to Note action to select a specific note where you want to collect your book points. By default, it's set to an existing note, but you can change this to any note you prefer or modify the action to create a new note each time.

Summary

The Book Points AI shortcut is a game-changer for anyone who reads physical books and wants to keep digital notes. By leveraging the power of on-device text recognition and Apple Intelligence, it transforms a tedious manual task into a fast, automated workflow. This allows you to build a digital library of your most important reading takeaways with minimal effort.

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