Kindle Scribes just got an AI upgrade to make them way more powerful

When I tested it back in late 2024, the refreshed Kindle Scribe promised a lot of new AI-enhanced features, some of which weren't quite ready to come out of the oven. Amazon acknowledged that at the time, and has spent the months since its launch occasionally deploying updates to add in new features.

As the only one that comes with a stylus in the box, the Kindle Scribe is de facto the best Kindle for note-taking. Much was made of its ability to summarise those notes using AI, to give you quick-look glimpses of your assembled thoughts, but that feature didn't have a great deal of flexibility built into it on arrival.

Now, though, Amazon's rolling out a new software update for the Kindle Scribe that makes things a little more personal. When you get a summary, you'll now be able to choose between different tones for that generated text – short or long, professional or casual.

That means you can both tweak how lengthy the summary is and what sort of voice it adopts, which is pretty topical in the AI world. Quite a few of the biggest chat models have started to get more informal in their tone when you ask them questions without steering that tone yourself – possibly as a result of finding that looser tones get better engagement with users.

If you're a Scribe user, Amazon's laid out how to actually use the new customisation, as follows:

1. While in the notebooks section, tap the AI button on the top menu.
2. Tap on "Summarise."
3. While looking at the preview, tap "Customise".
4. Choose what tone and length you'd like for your summary from here.

A further tidbit of good news is that once you select some settings, your Scribe will remember them going forward until you next change them, so you won't have to do this every time you generate a summary. All of this should make it easier to get the sort of summaries you want.

Whether you actually use the summaries feature much is another question – although I'm basically a user who didn't find taking notes all that persuasive an option in the first place, so I can't really comment. Being able to see my notes organised and clarified does seem like a useful addition, though.