Outlook’s Apple Watch has been updated Thursday with the ability to reply to emails directly from your wrist using Siri dictation, emoji or canned responses, among other new features and enhancements.
The new features make the wearable app much more functional than before. Before today, Outlook for Apple Watch only allowed you to see your emails but not reply to or interact with them.
Other changes in Outlook 1.3.5 for iOS include a glance with upcoming appointments and incoming emails, rich notifications that can be interacted with and other tidbits.
Brand new Apple Watch experience
Outlook’s much-improved app for Apple Watch allows you to reply to emails using canned responses which, unfortunately, cannot be customized through the companion Apple Watch app.
But don’y worry, if built-in responses aren’t suitable for the context of your reply you can use emoji or dictate your response using Siri’s speech-to-text function.
Outlook’s new glance view shows you most important emails and upcoming calendar appointments by swiping on your watch face from the bottom of the screen.
The app’s notifications have been upgraded with custom alerts.
Now when Outlook buzzes your wrist, you can interact with the notification and choose to quickly archive a message, schedule it for later and more, without having to switch to Outlook’s main Apple Watch app.
Lastly, notifications show a lot more of the email body and you can cherry-pick specific alerts that will hit your wrist within the main Outlook app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. And when you tap on the Outlook icon in the notification, the full email will open in the main Apple Watch app.
Outlook 1.3.5 changelog
The following new features and enhancements were added in this edition of Outlook:
- Get a quick glance of what’s happening in your Outlook Inbox or what’s next in your calendar just by swiping up from the Watch face. Just try it, you’ll love it.
- Need more context? Catch up with unread emails during your busy day right from the Outlook Watch App. When it’s really urgent, just reply directly from your watch with the set of replies we’ve pre-written just for you. We also have emojis and voice dictation if you’re more than kind of person.
- Never miss what’s really important to you. Get notified of important emails and take action immediately thanks to our custom notifications. Archive that. Schedule this for later. It’s easy as 1, 2, 3.
Microsoft’s dedicated website for wearables details other Office apps for the Apple Watch, including OneDrive, PowerPoint, Skype, Translator, Sunrise Calendar, Wunderlist and OneNote.
Outlook availability
Outlook is a 47.4-megabyte download from the App Store.
The app requires an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with iOS 7.0 or later and is built on the technology from Microsoft’s $200+ million acquisition of the popular email app Acompli.
Outlook is optimized for native display resolution of the iPhone 5/5s/5c, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. As mentioned before, the App Store download includes a WatchKit component with an all-new glance and a much improved Apple Watch app.
The app is localized in English, Bokmål, Norwegian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.