Text Summarizer

How it works

1. Paste the text you want to summarize into the input panel.
2. Choose the text's language (this affects which words are ignored as 'filler', like articles and prepositions).
3. Set how many sentences you want the summary to have.
4. Click 'Summarize'; the algorithm calculates the frequency of relevant words, scores each sentence based on those words, and selects the highest-scoring ones.
5. The selected sentences are shown in their original order, not in order of importance.

Use cases

• Get a quick overview of a long article's main ideas before reading it in full.
• Generate a summary of a text to use as an introduction or preliminary abstract.
• Reduce a lengthy report to its most representative sentences for a quick review.
• Quickly compare the content of several texts by reading only their summaries.

Common mistakes

• Expecting a summary written with new words, like an AI assistant would produce.
  This is an extractive summary: it selects complete sentences from the original text, it doesn't generate new text. If the original text is hard to read, the summary will keep that same wording.
• Requesting very few sentences for a text covering many different ideas.
  If the text covers several topics and you ask for only 1 or 2 sentences, the summary may leave out important ideas. Try increasing the sentence count if the result feels incomplete.
• Using the wrong language for the text you're summarizing.
  The language affects which words are treated as 'filler' (articles, prepositions) and ignored when calculating relevance; the wrong language can make sentence scoring less accurate.

Frequently asked questions

Alternatives

AI-based tools like ChatGPT can generate paraphrased, more fluent summaries, but require sending your text to an external service. This tool is useful when you prefer to keep the original text intact (no rewriting) and process it entirely in your browser.