Text Summarizer

Paste a long text and this picks out its most important sentences, in their original order, to form a short summary. It scores each sentence by how many frequent, meaningful words it contains and gives a small bonus to the opening sentence. Nothing is rewritten, so every sentence in the summary is one the author wrote.

How to use it

1. Paste your text.
2. Choose how many sentences to keep.
3. Read the summary.
4. Copy it.

When it helps

• Getting the gist of a long article before committing to it.
• Making a quick abstract for notes.
• Skimming reports and emails.
• Reducing a document before reading it in full.

Good to know

• It works best on articles with a clear structure, such as news reports.
• Try a few different lengths and compare.
• Always check the original for detail and context.

How sentences are scored

First the text is split into sentences. The tool then counts how often each meaningful word appears across the whole text, ignoring common filler words. A sentence scores higher when it contains many of those frequent words, adjusted for length so long sentences don't win just by being long. The first sentence gets a small boost, because openings often state the topic.

The top-scoring sentences are then put back in the order they appeared, so the summary reads in a natural sequence. It's a classic technique called extractive summarisation, and it has been used for decades.

Worked example: a news article

Suppose you paste a 600-word article about solar power with fourteen sentences and ask for three. The sentences that mention solar, costs and growth most often rise to the top, and those become the summary. The percentage shown tells you how much shorter it is than the original.

If the result reads oddly, try keeping four or five sentences. A summary built from selected sentences can feel choppy because it skips the connecting text between them.

Strengths and limits

Extractive methods are predictable and fast, and they can't invent facts, which is a real advantage over generative tools. They can't, however, combine ideas or explain things in new words, and they struggle with texts that don't repeat key terms, such as poems or dialogue.

Use it to decide whether a document deserves a careful read, not as a substitute for reading something important. A summary of a contract or a medical report is no replacement for the real thing.

Better summaries, step by step

If the first summary seems off, try changing the number of sentences. A longer summary keeps more context. Also check the input: text with headings, menus or captions pasted in will confuse the scoring, so remove those first.

For academic papers, summarise section by section instead of all at once, so each part of the argument is represented.

Summaries and sources

If you share a summary, link to or name the original text. Readers can then check the full context, and the author gets credit for the work.

Questions