Alice Martin has five years experience as a writer before joining Techopedia in 2024. After completing an interdisciplinary degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences at…
We uphold a strict editorial policy that focuses on factual accuracy, relevance, and impartiality. Our content, created by leading industry experts, is reviewed by a team of seasoned editors to ensure compliance with the highest standards in reporting and publishing.
Disclosure
When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn how our funding model works. By using this website you agree to our terms and conditions and privacy policy.
Why Trust Techopedia
We uphold a strict editorial policy that focuses on factual accuracy, relevance, and impartiality. Our content, created by leading industry experts, is reviewed by a team of seasoned editors to ensure compliance with the highest standards in reporting and publishing.
Disclosure
When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn how our funding model works. By using this website you agree to our terms and conditions and privacy policy.
The best AI summarizer will help you process large amounts of information quickly by turning long-form content into key points and ideas. These tools can help with speed reading, digesting large amount of information before a deadline, or create short teasers of content to see whether you should read the full version.
You might have noticed the overwhelming range of new AI summarizing tools hit the market over the last year. I’ve tested and compared the industry-leading summary generators based on their unique features, interfaces, pricing, and accuracy to help you find the best one for your needs and budget.
The Best AI Content Summarizers Tested by Our Experts
I’ll explore each of the top AI summarizer tools in greater detail to help you choose one that best suits your needs and budget.
1. Jasper AI — Best AI for Summarizing Articles
Starting Price
$39/month
Free Version
Trial
Top Features
Multi-lingual, Intelligent chatbot interface, Specify any part of text to summarize
Why We Picked It
As one of the industry’s best AI writing tools, it’s no surprise that Jasper AI has also included a text summarizer. This tool effortlessly extracts essential insights from large text pieces to give you a comprehensive summary with just a few clicks.
I particularly like the huge range of features Jasper AI has to make content summation easier, including a Custom Summaries feature which allows you to be more specific about which content Jasper should focus on when summarizing.
Also, it can do this in over 30 languages for those needed multi-lingual functionality.
Features
Chatbot — Jasper AI’s chatbot interprets your instructions using natural language processing (NLP) so you just need to ask the Jasper chatbot, “Can you summarize this for me?”
Custom Summaries — You can also select how much of the text is summarized by highlighting portions of the material and directing Jasper AI to provide a short or long-form summary.
Translation — You can request that Jasper AI summarizes your content in a variety of styles and in over 30 different languages, giving you access to a wide range of international material.
Pricing
Jasper AI has three pricing plans, and there is a 7-day free trial on its Creator and Pro plans.
Plan
Creator
Pro
Business
Monthly
$49/seat
$69/seat
Custom
Annual
$39/seat
$59/seat
Custom
Creator — 1 user, 1 brand voice, SEO mode, Google Chrome browser extension.
Pro — 6 seats, 3 brand voices, 10 knowledge assets, 3 instant campaigns, and access to Jasper Art.
Business — Unlimited feature access, performance analytics, enterprise-level security, API access, dedicated account manager, custom style guides.
You will need to enter your credit card information to access the free trial. However, you can cancel at any time.
Who it's Best For
Jasper AI is ideal for those needing a comprehensive, feature-rich, premium AI writing product. In addition to its AI summarizer, it offers a variety of helpful text features. The platform can generate text in several useful formats, assist with marketing campaigns, and create unique AI images.
However, it is not the most affordable option, priced at $39 per user, per month. Therefore, if you only need a tool for a quick one-off summary, I’d recommend Quillbot.
2. HubSpot — Best Free AI Summarizer for Content Marketing
Starting Price
$15/seat/month
Free Version
Free plan
Top Features
Content repurposing, Reporting automation, HubSpot suite integration
Why We Picked It
The HubSpot suite of tools is used by thousands of businesses globally, and I’ve been impressed with its recent releases of AI tools that are helping marketing teams work faster and smarter.
For any marketing team looking to improve their CRM, marketing, sales, customer service, or reporting efforts with AI-powered summaries, the HubSpot AI summarizer is my top recommendation. The bonus here is that this feature is available on HubSpot’s free plan.
Features
Marketing content repurposing — The HubSpot AI summarizer allows you to summarize long-form marketing copy such as articles or blog content and quickly repurpose it into effective, compelling social posts and ad content. This means you save time on re-tailoring your content for different marketing platforms.
Performance reporting automation — The HubSpot AI summarizer can quickly pull large data sets and create concise yet accurate and info-rich performance report summaries. If done manually, this usually take hours to put together.
Integration with HubSpot suite — If you’d benefit from AI summaries that could fuel your CRM, customer service, marketing, or sales efforts, then the HubSpot suite of tools is for you. For example, this could look like summarizing customer interaction records or even ticket history.
Pricing
HubSpot offers a free plan that allows you to use the basic AI summarization features, with four paid plans.
Plan
Free
Content Hub Starter
Starter Customer Platform
Content Hub Professional
Content Hub Enterprise
Annual
$0
$15/seat/month
$15/seat/month
$450/seat/month
$1,500/seat/month
Monthly
$0
$20/seat/month
$20/seat/month
$500/seat/month
$1,500/seat/month
Free — This plan supports up to 5 users and offers basic tools for marketing, sales, service, and content, including the AI content generator and summarizer.
Content Hub Starter — Everything from the Free plan, along with additional benefits like removing HubSpot branding from website pages, forms, landing pages, and the AI blog. Users also gain access to AI assistants and premium hosting.
Starter Customer Platform — Everything from the Content Hub Starter, plus tools from Content Hub Starter, Sales Hub Starter, Service Hub Starter, and Operations Hub Starter to help you generate leads, close deals, and manage customer relationships.
Content Hub Professional — Expect more advanced tools like AI translation, A/B testing, smart content for pages, content remix, content embed, custom reporting, memberships, and dynamic pages.
Content Hub Enterprise — This is the most powerful content marketing solution providing advanced control and flexibility for large-scale operations.
Who it's Best For
The HubSpot AI summarizer is best for marketing teams with a focus on inbound marketing or lead generation. The summarizer can supercharge a multi-channel content strategy through content repurposing, while making marketing campaign performance data more accessible and actionable.
HubSpot currently only summarizes content in English, so if you need a multilingual summarizer, I’d recommend Anyword or Paraphraser.io.
Pros
Summarizer available on free plan
Advanced AI for contextual understanding
Slick, easy-to-use interface
Seamless integration with HubSpot marketing, sales, and CRM tools
Cons
Currently only available in English
Large jump in plan prices for two most expensive plans
3. Scalenut — Best AI Summarizer for SEO Content Generation
Starting Price
$19/month
Free Version
Trial
Top Features
Generates multiple variations, Highly integrated with SEO tools, Variable output lengths
Why We Picked It
Scalenut provides a comprehensive SEO suite for keyword research and the generation of high-quality SEO long-form content.
Scalenut instantly generates several summaries from your text input, which you can then manually edit or outsource editing to Scalenut’s AI writer.
I found the ability to rapidly build several different summaries quite useful when trying to find the right terminology for my summary.
While it’s not quite as customizable as some other summarization tools I’ve used, it can be useful when you use it as a basis for a summary you’re going to rewrite yourself.
Features
Cruise Mode — Cruise Mode is an automated writing feature that can build upon your summary to create a full 1,500-word article in under five minutes.
Keyword Planner — Creates strategic keyword clusters around your chosen topic allowing you to focus on keywords aligned with the themes you want to write about.
Copywriter — The summary tool is just one of over 50 templates on offer from Scalenut. You can also use it for a wide range of other writing tasks like product descriptions, headlines, and social media posts.
Pricing
Scalenut has four pricing plans and offers a 7-day free trial with its Essential, Growth, and Pro plans.
Plan
Essential
Growth
Pro
Enterprise
Monthly
$39/month
$79/month
$149/month
Custom
Annual
$19/month
$39/month
$74/month
Custom
Essential — 100k words, 5 SEO articles per month, SEO templates, AI images, factual content.
Growth — Unlimited words, 30 SEO articles per month, audit and optimize 30 articles per month, 60 keyword clusters per month, analyze 200 webpages per month on a single domain.
Pro — Everything in Growth + 75 SEO articles per month, 75 keyword clusters per month, and analyze 500 webpages per month on 5 different domains.
Enterprise — Custom limit on SEO articles, unlimited webpage analysis, advanced AI models, enterprise-level security, tailored onboarding.
Who it's Best For
Since Scalenut is particularly strong in the AI SEO department, making it well-suited for professionals who write for commercial purposes, such as in SEO content writing, marketing, or social media.
The summary tool does have an 800-character limit, which may be restrictive. Scalenut’s summarizer complements its copywriter tool, expanding on ideas and rephrasing existing information rather than being able to simplify complex topics.
Pros
Summary tool outputs multiple drafts
Integrates with a whole SEO tool suite
Dedicated summary generation tool for granular control
Keyword planner assists in building content from summaries
Quillbot is a powerful AI-assisted writing tool that offers a range of functions, including paraphrasing, grammar checking, and plagiarism detection.
It offers a free summary generator that generates paragraphs summarizing the core points of your text. You can also upload Microsoft Word documents to summarize.
Features
AI Content Detector — QuillBot is the only tool on our list that offers its own AI content detector feature.
Custom Summaries — Changing the length of your output is as simple as moving a slider, and you can opt for paragraphs, bullet points, or custom formatting.
Summary Stats — A stat readout will inform you how many words, sentences, and characters you’ve reduced your text by.
Pricing
QuillBot offers many of its tools for free, but I’d recommend upgrading to Premium to bypass its usage limitations. Below, I’ve explained the pricing model for QuillBot’s plans:
Plan
Premium
Monthly
$19.95/month
Bi-annual
$13.33/month
Annual
$8.33/month
Free — Paraphrase 125 words in 2 modes, basic grammar fixes, 50 AI prompts per day, basic summarizing.
Premium — Unlimited paraphrasing, AI prompts, advanced grammar fixes, custom summaries, and plagiarism detection.
Who it's Best For
QuillBot’s generous free plan includes multiple features like summarization, paraphrasing, and citation generation. I’d recommend it for students and academics looking for a helpful research and essay writing sidekick that’s free forever. The Google Chrome extension and Microsoft Word integration mean you can use it without having to switch tabs.
QuillBot’s AI copywriting is not as impressive as Jasper AI’s, and it lacks Scalenut’s SEO tools, meaning it is not as suitable for SEO or marketing copywriting.
5. Anyword AI — Best AI That Summarizes Content in Different Formats
Starting Price
$39/month
Free Version
Trial
Top Features
Multi-language support, Multiple summary options, Unique generated text
Why We Picked It
Anyword AI offers a text summarizer tool that lets you efficiently condense lengthy pieces of content into concise snippets.
What sets Anyword AI apart is the various summary formats the tool provides, including paragraphs, TL;DR, and keywords. This allows you to choose the style that best suits your needs while generating summaries.
You can also use the AI summarization capabilities to generate multiple summary variations for any given text input.
Features
Summary Formats — Whether you want to receive your summary in a paragraph, keywords, or TL;DR, Anyword AI’s text summarizer offers a convenient solution for effectively condensing a diverse range of content types.
Multilingual Summaries — Anyword AI supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German.
Sentence Rewriter — In just a few clicks, Anyword AI can tweak your headline or Instagram caption to be more eye-catching.
Pricing
Anyword AI offers four paid subscription models. I’ve broken down the cost of each plan below:
Data-Driven — Everything in Starter, but with 3 seats and unlimited 1-click performance booster.
Business — Everything in Data-Driven, but with 3 seats, 5 brand voices, marketing channel integration, copy analysis across marketing channels, A/B testing, onboarding and account set up support.
Enterprise — Everything in Business, plus enterprise-grade security, SSO, private language model, custom marketing channel integration, custom AI models, full API access, priority support, and a dedicated account manager.
Who it's Best For
Anyword AI is a great tool for enterprise-level teams, marketers, and writers. It offers a diverse range of summary inputs and outputs, and its data-driven tools elevate your content management to the next level.
The features are performance-focused and integrate with your marketing channels to improve your brand reach. Since it’s one of the pricier tools in our shortlist, Anyword AI is an ideal investment for larger teams that will see ROI by utilizing its technical features.
However, if you’re simply looking to summarize a few articles or work on your research paper, I’d recommend Quillbot or Paraphraser.io.
Pros
Support for several different languages
Multiple types of summarization are available
Seven-day free trial to test out summarization tool
Video transcription and summarization, Automatic caption generator, Subtitle generator
Why We Picked It
In addition to being one of the leading AI video tools, PictoryAI offers exceptional AI-enabled video summarization thanks to its “scene detection” capabilities. This feature ensures key moments and transitions are captured in summarized versions.
It also has a lot to make video creators’ lives easier, such as automation caption and subtitle generation.
Features
Video transcription and summarization — PictoryAI can quickly transcribe and summarize long video content into condensed versions. It can also transcribe videos into text, capturing all the key points
Automatic caption generator — You no longer need to spend time writing captions to describe videos, as PictoryAI can automatically generate them from your video.
Subtitle generator — Say goodbye to the painstaking process of writing subtitles with PictoryAI’s automated subtitle generator.
Pricing
PictoryAI offers four plans, below I’ve explained what’s on offer in each.
Plan
Starter
Professional
Teams
Enterprise
Monthly price
$25/month
$49/month
$119/month
Custom
Annual price
$19/month
$39/month
$99/month
Custom
Starter — 1 user, 200 video minutes per month, multilingual standard AI voices, unlimited access to 2 million+ royalty-free videos, and basic AI features.
Professional — 1 user, 600 video minutes per month, 120 minutes per month of multilingual voices from ElevenLabs, unlimited access to 10 million+ royalty-free videos, auto-synchronization of voiceovers, and video summarization of long videos.
Teams — 3 users, 1800 video minutes per month, 240 minutes per month of multilingual voices from ElevenLabs, and API access.
Enterprise — Everything in Teams, plus customized usage limits, onboarding, training, video consulting, priority support, and customer support manager.
Who it's Best For
PictoryAI is a great tool for video creators who need supplementary text for video content, such as YouTube videos, podcasts, and webinars. These summaries can be used as captions, subtitles, and transcriptions. It’ll also work for anyone needing to digest long-form video content quickly.
If you need a tool for paraphrasing or rewriting text, I’d recommend using Jasper AI or Writesonic instead.
Pros
‘Scene detection’ ensures video summarization is accurate
7. Paraphraser.io — Best AI Article Summarizer and Rewriter
Starting Price
$9/week
Free Version
Limited free version
Top Features
Simple text summarizer, Article rewriter, AI essay writer
Why We Picked It
I appreciate the simplicity and contextual understanding of Paraphraser.io’s dedicated AI article summarizer tool. A basic version is available for free, offering article rewriting (or “spinning”), grammar checking, and plagiarism detecting tools.
During hands-on testing, I liked the variety of paraphrasing ‘modes’, including its creative option. What really stood out for me is that it supports multiple languages, unlike many other summarizer tools.
Features
Simple text summarizer — Paraphraser.io offers an easy-to-use text summarizer with a stripped back interface. It allows includes a slider tool so that you can control just how concise your output is.
Article rewriter — It also offers an article rewriting feature with ‘word changer’ or ‘creative’ modes.
AI essay writer — If you’ve really left it too late to work on your essay, you could utilize Paraphraser.io’s AI essay writer. It offers a somewhat basic solution, but it lets you choose the length, topic, and complexity of your results.
Pricing
Paraphraser.io offers seven plans, plus custom pricing.
Plan
Lite
Standard
Silver
Gold
Diamond
Platinum
Enterprise
Price
$9/week
$15/week
$23/month
$40/month
$499/month
$165/year
$999/year
Lite — 18,000 words total, 1,500 per submission, 3 modes, user dashboard, multilingual support, no ads, and chat support.
Standard — 36,000 words total, 1,500 per submission, 3 modes, user dashboard, multilingual support, no ads, and chat support.
Silver — 46,000 words total, 2,000 per submission, 3 modes, user dashboard, multilingual support, no ads, and chat support.
Gold — 92,000 words total, 2,000 per submission, 3 modes, user dashboard, multilingual support, no ads, and chat support.
Diamond — 46,000 words total, 5,000 per submission, 3 modes, user dashboard, multilingual support, no ads, API, dedicated customer success manager, and chat support.
Platinum — 33,000 words total, 3,000 per submission, 3 modes, user dashboard, multilingual support, no ads, and API access.
Enterprise — 3 million words total, 10,000 per submission, 3 modes, user dashboard, multilingual support, no ads, API, dedicated customer success manager, and chat support.
Who it's Best For
I’d recommend Paraphraser.io to anyone looking to rewrite or spin articles into unique blog content, or to boil down articles to key points for quick reading or sharing.
It only works with text, so if you’re looking for an audio or video-to-text tool, check out PictoryAI. I’d also say the free plan is too limited for this to be a free article summarizer tool for students looking to summarize longer academic papers or articles.
PDF summarizer, Multi-lingual text summarizer, Ad copy and product descriptions
Why We Picked It
If you’re after AI that can summarize PDF files, Writesonic is your best bet. It intuitively highlights key points and essential information for speed reading. It even allows you to interact with the PDF and its summarization in the chat, allowing you to request specific customizations of the summaries to suit your needs.
During hands-on testing, I found that it also offers a robust set of AI-powered content creation features.
Features
PDF summarizer — Writesonic can quickly turn long and complex PDF documents into key information, allowing for effective speed reading of crucial documents. It allows you to customize the final version with interactive input.
Multi-lingual text summarizer — Writesonic’s text summarizer is proficient in 25+ languages.
Ad copy and product descriptions — It can generate short-form copy for use on Facebook ads or as product descriptions for your online store.
Pricing
Plan
Free
Chatsonic
Individual
Standard
Professional
Advanced
Annual price
$0
$12/month
$16/month
$79/month
$199/month
$399/month
Monthly price
$0
$15/month
$20
$99/month
$249/month
$499/month
Free — All features of Writesonic and Chatsonic, 5 generations for standard templates, 25 credits for advanced templates.
Chatsonic — Unlimited generations, GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus quality, Google integration for the latest research, unlimited file chat, and prompt optimization.
Individual — Unlimited generations for standard templates, 50 credits per month for advanced templates.
Standard — Everything in Individual, plus more advanced article writing, automated internal linking, and AI topic clusters.
Professional — Everything in Standard, plus teams, AI content gap analyzer, up to 3 team members, and personalized onboarding.
Advanced — Everything in Professional, plus Google Search Console integration, up to 5 team members, personalized onboarding, and priority support.
Who it's Best For
Writesonic is the best choice for PDF summarization – it’s simple to upload files, and I appreciate the interactive customization options it offers.
It would also come in handy if you’re looking for a comprehensive writing assistant with a generous free plan to help with creating high-quality blog posts, thanks to its host of smart AI article writing and SEO research tools.
However, this may be a bit overly complicated if you’re simply looking for a one-off summary generator tool for a quick task. For this, I’d recommend Quillbot or Paraphraser.io.
Pros
Easy-to-use, interactive AI PDF summarizer
Tons of SEO-informed features
AI model uses live Google research
Chatbot rivals ChatGPT and Claude
Cons
Sharp increase in pricing between standard and advanced template plans
9. Simplified — Best AI Summary Generator for Social Media Content
Starting Price
$10/month
Free Version
Free plan
Top Features
Creative text summarizer, Blog ideas and outline, Caption generator
Why We Picked It
I found that Simplified is one of the best AI summary generators for those working across text, design, video, and social media, as it combines all four mediums.
Features
Creative text summarizer — Simplified’s text summarizer stands out as being particularly good for creatives and marketers. My hands-on testing shows that its summaries are highly optimized towards reader engagement and it offers highly customizable tones and styles to match brand voices.
Blog ideas and outline — In addition to working with pre-existing content, Simplified can also help you overcome writer’s block and generate new ideas and outlines for your blog.
Caption generator — Another one of Simplified’s features is generating snappy short-form captions for your photos.
Pricing
Plan
Free Forever
Simplified One
AI Writer Enterprise
Annual price
$0
$24/month
Custom
Monthly price
$0
$29.99/month
Custom
Free Forever — Unlimited projects, 1000+ fonts, photos, icons, and templates, and 5GB storage.
Simplified One — GPT 4 Turbo, 1 AI brand book with a knowledge base, access to Simplified AI Chat, AI Blog Writer with SEO mode, 80+ AI Templates, and 40+ Languages supported
AI Writer Enterprise — Simplified API Access, knowledge base configuration, SSO private team spaces and user permissions, advanced workflow automations, higher storage limits, and dedicated account management.
Who it's Best For
Simplified is ideal for creatives and marketers, especially if you’re looking for a tool that can combine design, writing, and video. I can see it being very helpful for social media managers or anyone else working with multi-media content production.
It’s perhaps less ideal for students looking for a simple paraphraser or grammar checker. For this, I’d suggest using QuillBot.
I’ve created a concise summary of the key features, price points, and other relevant information concerning the top AI summary generator tools, including a plagiarism checker and translation capabilities.
An artificial intelligence (AI) summarizer analyzes text using NLP techniques to highlight the most important points. Once you’ve copied over your chosen text into the editor, the AI tools use an algorithm to evaluate the sentences and prioritize them based on factors such as word frequency and semantic relevance.
The sentences are ranked according to importance and arranged in a logical flow. You can customize the length and style of the summary according to how you prefer to read information, whether that’s in a paragraph or bullet points.
The Latest Updates From the World of AI Content Summarization Tools
August, 2024: Copilot in Microsoft Word allows registered users to summarise chats over a specific period of time. This means you no longer have to manually scroll through extensive chat history to find the information you need. You can use a time-based phrases (like ‘yesterday’, or ‘six months’) to prompt the depth of the summary you want.
August 26th, 2024: As part of Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro updates, subscribers can now can now upload Google Sheets, Google Docs, CSVs, and PDFs, as well as Excel and Word files from Google Drive on their own devices. By doing this, users will have assistance with research and writing tasks and be able to generate presentation-ready charts from lengthy documents.
July 23rd, 2024: Meta has released LLaMA 3.1, an open-source model optimized for tasks such as text summarization. The aim is to provide a strong alternative to proprietary AI models.
June 21st, 2024: Claude 3.5 Sonnet is released. Anthropic’s latest model raises the bar with its state-of-the-art processing and intelligence. It’s available for free on Claude.ai and can be used for even more sophisticated summarization tasks.
Are AI Summaries Plagiarism Free?
While AI summarizing tools do produce unique text, you’ll need to learn how to recognize plagiarism. Since the tool extracts sentences directly from your source text, the ideas, structure, and tone may follow that of the original author.
This won’t be a problem if you’re only using the tool as a research assistant, or as a way to speed through your reading list. The issues arise if you were to publish the summary as your own work.
If you want to publish the summary as part of your own project, you should definitely paraphrase the output before doing so to avoid plagiarism.
Is it ethical to use AI content summarizers?
Techopedia believes that AI content summarizers can generate accurate and legitimate summaries, but human fact-checking and editing are still crucial.
AI content summarizers are ethical when used for personal use but not when used for repurposing other writers’ work and claiming it as your own, which is essentially plagiarism.
While it can be a valuable tool for research, it’s not advisable to directly publish AI content summaries online in order to preserve the quality and integrity of your writing.
What About AI Podcast Summarizers?
Our testing framework for the best AI summarizer tools focuses mostly on text and video summarization. We do cover tools with AI audio summarizer features, but we’re starting to investigate the best AI tools for podcast summarizing specifically. The best AI podcast summarizers are designed for the exact niche purpose of rounding-up podcast content, with features such as:
Automated Summarization: concise summary generation based on natural language processing (NLP) that extracts the salient information
Highlight Extraction: the tool recognises the highlights and key points and includes these in the summary
Chapter Marking: chapter sections are flagged for easy navigation through the podcast episode
Customizable Summary Length: users can control the length of the output, from super-short flash summaries to more in-depth roundups with more colour and information.
Integrations: it integrates well with social platforms or notetaking apps for seamless activity across all of them
Social Sharing: linked to the above, it allows users to easily share their AI generated podcast summaries and their own thoughts on various social platforms.
Some of the most popular AI podcast summarizers on the market today are Snipd, Podz, Summari, Abridged, and Castro.
The Benefits of Using an AI Summary Generator
The three main benefits of using AI content summarizer tools are:
Using an AI summary tool can help busy individuals quickly go through extensive reading material, providing invaluable assistance to those working under tight deadlines.
If you want to grasp the main ideas in a text but don’t have the time, need, or interest to read the whole piece, using an AI summarizing tool can provide a shortcut to understanding the main points.
If you’re struggling with a complex subject, an AI summary generator can provide a simplified version of the topic, making it easier for you to understand.
It’s important to weigh up all the benefits and risks of using AI summarizers before you begin using them regularly. Here’s my list of the main pros and cons I could identify.
Benefits of Using AI Summarizers
Time-saving: You can quickly condense lengthy texts into concise summaries, and gain back hours of time.
Increased efficiency: With the time you’ve won back from avoiding reading chunky texts, you can focus on more brain-intensive tasks
Consistency: AI tools will generate summaries with consistent formatting, meaning your notes will be meticulously organized and free from human errors.
Translation: You can quickly and easily translate texts into other languages, meaning you can understand foreign texts in your native language.
Customizable outputs: Generate summaries in the way you prefer to understand information, whether it be paragraphs or bullet points, the choice is yours.
Risks of Using AI Summarizers
Loss of Nuance: AI may miss subtle details or the context that a human might find important. With certain disciplines, especially in creative fields, this may lead to huge oversights.
Inaccuracy: Similarly, summaries can sometimes misinterpret the source material, especially in foreign language texts, leading to misleading or inaccurate conclusions.
Over-reliance: Depending too much on AI summaries could reduce your own critical thinking and comprehension skills.
How to Choose the Best AI Summarizing Tool
With so many tools to choose from, it can be difficult to know which AI summary generator is the best fit for your project. Here are some key considerations to make while choosing:
FeaturesAccuracyCustomizationEase of UseIntegrationsValue for Money
Does the provider only produce summaries or does it also offer other text generation, SEO, editing, image, and audio features to make it more worthwhile?
Are the summaries accurate enough the first time, or did the text have to undergo manual editing as well? Spending too much extra time editing can make the tool a redundant time-saving measure.
Does the tool offer multiple summary formats, such as paragraphs and bullet points, to suit your preferences?
How simple or complicated is the tool to get to grips with? Again, this tool should make your life easier, not more difficult.
The seamless integration of the AI summarizer tool with file sharing, productivity and social media tools and apps will make it much easier to share, store, and organize content summaries
How expensive is the tool? Even better, if it offers a free forever plan to help you summarize your text without costing you anything.
How to Use AI to Summarize Text — A Quick Guide
Here's a step-by-step guide on how to use QuillBot to summarize text.
Navigate to QuillBot's Summarizer
From QuillBot’s homepage, you’ll easily find its range of tools, including the summarizer, a grammar checker, AI detector, and a plagiarism checker.
Enter Text
On the left-hand side of the editor, you can paste the text you want to summarize. You can also select keywords to guide QuillBot on the parts of the text that are most relevant to your project. It’ll base the summary around this.
Summarize
Then hit the ‘Summarize’ button and your results will appear in the right-hand side of the editor. You’ll also get the chance to paraphrase the summary if you want to change the wording.
Shorten the Summary
If you want to streamline the text, you can use the slider at the top of the editor to adjust the length of the summary. You’ll have to regenerate the results to see the new summary.
Change Format
If you prefer to read information in a bulleted format, you can also reformat the summary into this style. Use the settings at the top of the screen to adjust the model of the summary. You can also create a custom format according to your preferences.
FAQs
Can AI summarize a PDF?
Yes, many AI summarizing tools can work either by uploading PDF files or by copying and pasting content directly into the tool.
What are the limitations of an AI summarizing tool?
AI summarizers are great for simplifying information, but they may have difficulty with complex or technical topics, leading to inaccuracies. It’s important to use them as a tool, but not rely solely on them for important research. Always double-check with reliable sources to ensure accuracy and completeness in your work.
Are AI summarizers reliable?
AI summarizers are incredibly helpful for a wide range of tasks. However, their reliability is dependent on factors such as text complexity, subject matter, use case, and the quality of the summarizer’s AI model.
What file formats do AI summary generators support?
An AI summarizing tool can support plain text files, PDFs, Word documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and HTML files, but this varies across different platforms.
Can I use an AI Summarizer to Shorten my College Essay?
You can use AI content summarizers to shorten your college essays and coursework, as you can for most text formats. Some of the tools on our list, like Quillbot, were designed with this use case in mind. It’s important that you check the quality of the summarizations yourself to ensure it’s maintained the intended meaning and hasn’t introduced anything inaccurate. Also bear in mind that if you’re looking to submit academic work you’ve summarize using AI, the original work must be your own (not created from scratch with AI and not plagiarised) and it may need your human intervention to ensure it’s in the right tone and style for your course, especially if it’s a creative subject.
Techopedia’s editorial policy is centered on delivering thoroughly researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We uphold strict sourcing standards, and each page undergoes diligent review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of our content for our readers.
Alice Martin has five years experience as a writer before joining Techopedia in 2024. After completing an interdisciplinary degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, she began writing in the arts and music industries. Driven by a love of research and analysis, Alice turned her attention towards all things software and technology. She now offers expert advice in these fields to help readers make informed decisions.