Your Kindle just got a noteworthy free upgrade from Amazon - check the settings now

If you’re in the market for a new, powerful Kindle e-reader you might be tempted by the high-end Kindle Scribe. The largest version of Amazon’s e-book devices offers a stylus in the box to write notes in books or create entire digital notebooks for you to organise your personal and work life in.

Whether you opt for the original 2022 Kindle Scribe or the newer 2024 version, or if you already own one, both models have just received a free software update that promises to improve notebook summarisation.

This feature uses artificial intelligence (AI) to read your handwritten notes in your digital notebooks on the Scribe, and then summarise them in shorter form.

It’s a similar AI tool to what Samsung and Apple offer on their smartphones, but is particularly useful if you want to take a lot of notes by hand in a meeting at work, for instance, and then want to summarise your thoughts into more manageable chunks.

While both Scribe models could already summarise, the new update now allows you to do more.

“From today, you can now personalise your summaries – from length to tone – tailoring your notes to be short or long, professional or casual,” Amazon said.

The firm said once you’ve tapped on the icon in the user interface to summarise your scribble, you can then tap ‘customise’ to select the tone and length of summary. You can then add these typed paragraphs to your notebook.

Your Scribe will remember your specific settings for next time if you want to keep summarising in that way, or you can change them as you go.

It could prove useful for distilling work notes into short professional sounding lines, while also summarising your outline for your next novel in a more casual but lengthy block.

Such AI tools have been added to Kindles, smartphones, tablets, laptops and all other manner of digital devices in the past couple of years as tech firms scramble to offer customers new features. Modern gadgets have become so good that people are holding onto them for longer rather than upgrade every couple of years, so Amazon and its rivals have dived into the growing world of artificial intelligence to try and tempt people to upgrade to newer models.

That can be particularly difficult for Amazon and its Kindles, which ostensibly all do the same thing very well, which is to display e-books. My nearly decade-old Kindle still works.

The Scribe’s 10-inch screen and pen make it a hybrid writing device, and with all its new fangled AI tools could attract new buyers. If you want a larger display, it’s a no-brainer, even if it is pricey. The newest model costs from £379.99.

Amazon said this latest update should automatically beam down to both 2022 and 2024 Scribe models when they’re connected to a Wi-Fi network, so if you have one of these clever Kindles the feature could be downloaded already. If you want to make sure, head to the settings menu on your device and tap ‘Update Your Kindle’.