Amazon just gave some Kindle Scribe owners a great free upgrade

When Amazon launched a new 2024 refresh of the Kindle Scribe, it did so with panache, mostly thanks to a slick new design and some lovely updated internals. I tested the e-reader and note-taker for a few weeks and found it really impressive, as its four-star review might already have hinted.

There was one little oddity, though, in the form of some much-vaunted AI features that were actually only available in full to customers and readers in the US at launch. Now, though, Amazon's putting that right for those in the UK, with a couple of these omissions coming to the Scribe here (but seemingly to Europe later).

In particular, the latest software update in the UK should let the Scribe use AI to quickly create summaries of notes that you've taken, letting you get at-a-glance summaries of what you've written even if it's pages and pages long. They'll be presented in bullet-point form, for handy readability.

Another feature is the addition of handwriting refinement, which can interpret your hand-written notes as you write them (or after) and convert them into a few choices of text fonts. This means you can continue scribbling away, but rely on text outcomes that you can copy and paste, or manipulate however you like.

These features should be available today in that software update, but one key detail is that they're actually not limited to the 2024 version of the Kindle Scribe. Despite the upgrade, the 2022 version will also be able to use them, suggesting that it's plenty powerful enough for some AI smarts, too.

That bucks a bit of a trend in tech recently, which has seen AI features come to only the newest generations of phones and laptops, perhaps as a way to encourage people to upgrade if they're really taken with the likes of Apple Intelligence or Google Gemini.

As someone who used the Scribe a bunch, though, I will say that I'm not sure these additions move the needle that much. The core attraction of the Scribe is its note-taking capability, for sure, but minor improvements to that ability won't win over anyone who doubts they'll ever actually take notes. For most, as you can see from my round-up of the best Kindles on the market, a simple Paperwhite still stands out as the most sensible choice.