Warming up the reading glasses…
Heads up
About AI summaries
This summary is an AI paraphrase, not a verbatim quote. For high-stakes use (legal, medical, academic, news verification), always read the original source and verify any specific facts, numbers, dates, or quotes you plan to rely on.
The summary is produced by a large language model. Like any generative model, it can occasionally invent details that aren't in the source. Treat it as a fast first pass, not a citation.
Recent summaries
How it works
The AI Summarizer accepts four input modes (Paste text, URL, PDF, YouTube), extracts the underlying content, and asks a large language model to produce six different summary formats in a single call. Producing all six formats in one shot is materially cheaper than asking for them separately and means you can compare formats side-by-side and pick the right one for where the summary will live (an email vs. a tweet vs. a section outline).
Input modes:
- Paste text. Most reliable. You control exactly what goes in.
- URL. We fetch the page through a proxy, parse the main body, summarize from there. Paywalled or login-gated pages, single-page apps that render client-side, and sophisticated bot-protected sites can fail. Falls back to Paste mode when fetch fails.
- PDF. Direct text extraction from standard PDFs (Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice, LaTeX, Acrobat). Up to 10 MB / 200 pages. Scanned image-only PDFs aren't supported (we don't run OCR).
- YouTube (Beta). Fetches the official caption track through a proxy. YouTube has hardened this in 2026, so some videos return empty bodies; when that happens, use Paste mode with the transcript copied from YouTube's own "Show transcript" feature.
Output formats are TL;DR (one sentence), Executive bullets (3-5 bullets), Detailed bullets (longer), Tweet (under 280 chars), Email recap (a paragraph), and Section outline (preserves the source's structure). Each format renders as its own card with Copy and Regenerate.
Honest framing. A summary is an AI paraphrase, not a verbatim quote. The model can occasionally invent details that aren't in the source (hallucination). For high-stakes use (legal, medical, academic, news verification) always read the original and verify specific facts. The reading-time savings strip above the cards shows roughly how much time the summary saves versus reading the full source.
Plan caps. Word limits per submission: Free 5,000 / Bronze 10,000 / Silver 20,000 / Gold 30,000 / Platinum 50,000. Each call consumes a portion of your shared daily AI token budget; the budget is shared across every AI tool on this site.
What you will see
- Input modes (Paste / URL / PDF / YouTube)
- Four ways to give the tool source text. Pick whichever matches what you have. The form below the toggle swaps to the right input control for each mode.
- Focus keyword
- An optional phrase you want emphasized in the summary. Useful when the source covers multiple topics and you want the summary to lean on the one you care about.
- Output language
- The language the summary is written in. Auto-detect uses the source's language. You can also pick a different language than the source (a Spanish source summarized in English, for example).
- Length preset
- Roughly how compressed the summary should be. Affects all six output formats together.
- Reading-time savings strip
- Above the cards, shows estimated reading time for the original versus the summary, plus the percentage saved. Useful for deciding whether the summary is worth reading versus jumping straight to the source.
- Source subhead
- The page title (URL mode), filename (PDF), or video title (YouTube), plus the source URL when applicable. So you can see at a glance what got summarized.
- The six format cards
- TL;DR, Executive bullets, Detailed bullets, Tweet, Email recap, Section outline. Each card has its own Copy and Regenerate buttons. Regenerate re-rolls just that one format.
- Recent summaries
- The last 10 submissions, in your browser localStorage for 30 days.
Frequently asked questions
How do I summarize text with this tool?
Pick an input mode (Paste text, URL, PDF, or YouTube), drop your content in, optionally add a focus keyword you want emphasized in the summary, pick an output language and a length preset, and click Summarize. You get six output formats in one click: a TL;DR, executive bullets, detailed bullets, a tweet-length condensation, an email recap, and a per-section outline. Hit Regenerate on any card to re-roll just that format.
What are the 5 steps in summarizing a text?
- Read the full text first. A summary written from a partial read will miss the main thesis.
- Identify the main claim. What is the single sentence the author would put on the back cover?
- Find the supporting points. Usually 3-5 sub-arguments that justify the main claim.
- Drop the examples. Examples support the points; in a summary the points themselves are the content.
- Compress. Get to a length that fits where the summary will live (TL;DR is one sentence; an email recap is a paragraph; a section outline preserves structure). This tool produces all six formats in parallel so you can pick what fits.
What are the 4 basic rules for summarizing?
The traditional rules: (1) capture the main idea, not every supporting detail; (2) use your own words, do not copy phrasing verbatim; (3) keep the original meaning faithful, do not introduce claims the source did not make; (4) be brief enough that the summary is actually useful as a shortcut to the original. The tool tries to follow all four, but a large language model can occasionally drift (especially rule 3, faithfulness). Always cross-check critical facts against the source.
Can AI summarize a text for me?
Yes, and it does so by reading the full input and producing each output format in one pass. AI summarizers are notably stronger than older extractive summarizers (which just pick representative sentences) because they can paraphrase and restructure. They are also susceptible to hallucination: occasionally a model will invent a detail not in the source. This tool ships a clear caveat directly in the results region for that reason: treat the summary as a fast first pass, then verify any specific facts, dates, numbers, or quotes against the source before relying on them.
How do you summarize an article from a URL?
Pick URL mode, paste the article URL, and submit. We fetch the page through a proxy, extract the main body content (ignoring navigation, ads, and footers), and summarize from there. Common failure modes: pages behind a paywall or login (we cannot fetch what we cannot see); pages that serve different content to bots than to browsers (we send browser-like headers but sophisticated CDN protections can still block us); single-page apps that render content client-side after page load (the fetched HTML has no content to parse). When fetch fails, use Paste mode instead.
Why does YouTube mode sometimes fail?
YouTube has hardened transcript scraping. As of mid-2026, the timedtext endpoint that exposes captions returns empty bodies for many videos when fetched from cloud servers, regardless of which proxy we route through. The mode ships tagged Beta for that reason. When a video fails, open it on YouTube, click "...more" then "Show transcript", copy the transcript text, and use Paste mode. The summary quality is identical; you are just doing the transcript fetch yourself.
Does Google AI summarize articles?
Yes. Google's AI Overviews feature, Gemini, NotebookLM, and the "Summarize this page" feature in Chrome all generate AI summaries. The differences vs. this tool: Google's summaries are typically inline / one-shot (no multiple output formats); they require a Google account to access most features; they are not built into a workflow where you control the input source (paste, URL, PDF, YouTube), focus keyword, language, and length preset. Our angle is the format variety and zero-signup workflow, not better AI per se.
How long can the input text be?
The word cap is per-plan. Free: 5,000 words. Bronze: 10,000. Silver: 20,000. Gold: 30,000. Platinum: 50,000. We chose those numbers to cover typical use cases (long-form blog post = 2,000-5,000 words; book chapter = 3,000-7,000; full academic paper = 8,000-15,000). For documents over the cap the tool stops at the limit and notes the truncation; for very long inputs consider splitting into chunks and summarizing each separately.