7 Best AI Summarizer Tools to Find Key Points (2024)

As a content writer and marketer, I love AI summarizer tools. They are powerful and helpful when I want to get critical points from a news piece, blog post, or PDF without reading the entire thing.

Getting the right information is vital for writing useful content and for making better decisions.

That’s where Artificial Intelligence (AI) steps in, saving us time by helping us make sense of massive amounts of written content – especially AI summarizer tools.

In this post, I’ll help you pick the best AI summarizer tool available today. You’ll also understand how an AI article summarizer can make you more productive.

What is a Summarizer?

Online summarizer tools have been around for a while even before the latest developments in AI.

However, the tools before had many limitations. They generated poor quality summaries and often missed key points.

Today, thanks to OpenAI and many hard-working brands, AI has been harnessed to create text summarizes, both free and paid.

An AI summarizer is an online tool or platform that extracts the main points of any article, paper, or blog post for easy understanding.

They are your assistants that make you more productive by turning vast amounts of text into concise, understandable summaries in seconds.

You can use a summarizer to find key concepts from a new journal article or to learn what happens in a story, YouTube video transcript, or book in an instant.

In this way, you’ll write your research paper faster, find relevant data for your blog post, or get to the theme of a book or story fast. You’ll save hours of time a day and focus on being creative and improving the quality of your work.

Now, let’s delve into my personally curated top AI summarizers to change your productivity game this year.

The Best AI Summarizers to Work With

I’ve tried and tested all these AI summary generators and found multiple use cases and benefits for all of them. The majority are free and easy to use and access. No learning is needed. Check out my best recommendations for AI text summarizers.

1. QuillBot

If you’re looking for the best AI summarizer tool there, you should try this: QuillBot’s Summarizer tool.

QuillBot is a paraphrasing AI platform that helps writers improve the quality of their work and their productivity.

One way this AI summary tool does this is by enabling writers to summarize long-form text into its most relevant key points.

It’s as simple as copying and pasting your writing and clicking on ‘Summarize’. You get an AI-generated summary that covers what a post, paper, or essay is about. This will help you spend less time researching and reading, and you’ll write content faster.

QuillBot is particularly intelligent because it lets you select specific keywords from the original text.

Selecting the right keywords will help the text summarizer extract points for the context you need. You can also paraphrase the summary to find a version that you like.

All in all, Quillbot is useful for generating summaries quickly while getting the context you need.

The free version will let you summarize 600 words at a time. So, consider upgrading for an unlimited word count. You can read my full QuillBot review to see what else it can do.

2. Wordtune

Wordtune is an AI reading and writing tool for generating summaries, fixing grammar issues, rewriting content, and more.

It has two main interfaces you can switch to: Read and Summarize and Write and Paraphrase.

Wordtune stands out because you can insert a URL, upload a PDF, or paste text – it’s your choice. This makes it far easier to summarize long pieces of text because you don’t have to scroll, copy, and paste manually.

It also allows you to focus on specific themes, keywords, or semantics when summarizing. That is, if you are trying to summarize an article that talks about multiple ideas or topics, you can ask Wordtune’s summary generator to focus on a specific one and highlight that.

And also, Wordtune has a Chrome Extension that will summarize content on the pages or website you’re on itself.

Wordtune makes research faster and more intelligent by helping you find exactly what you need. You’ll breeze through studying easily and write powerful, informative content. Also, read my full Wordtune review to know about all its features.

3. Grammarly

Grammarly is an AI-based grammar checker tool and it focuses on making writing concise.

You can use Grammarly for free (I recommend using its Chrome extension to make everyday writing easier). And it will check your writing for misspellings, wrong punctuation, and sentence structure.

Grammarly automatically makes suggestions for making your sentences shorter and more concise.

However, it also has a new AI assistant feature called Grammarly Go. You just need to sign into Grammarly and add its chrome extension. You’ll automatically get a tiny Grammarly floating widget or tool that acts as your summarizing assistant.

Use Grammarly Go for free and get 100 prompts a month i.e., you can ask it to summarize your writing with a prompt 100 times a month. But if you want to get more and use Grammarly’s other awesome features, consider taking the premium subscription, which is well worth the price.

4. Semrush

Semrush, the SEO platform for keyword research and market research has embraced AI and offers many AI writing features with its SEO tools.

It has a simple and accurate AI summarizing tool for free. Just copy and paste your content into its editor and it will simplify it into its most relevant points.

It’s straightforward and will meet your basic summarizing needs for long articles. And there are no limits unlike the other tools mentioned here, making it one of the few truly free and unlimited AI summary generators.

(By the way, you can create an AI summary tool for your own business too. And for cheap. No coding or hiring devs needed. Check out my post on AI form tools on how to do this.)

5. Jasper

Jasper is one of the first AI writing assistants that came out.

And it’s great for marketers and businesses and is a premium generative AI tool.

Jasper shines with its robust selection of templates, one of which includes the ‘Content Summarizer’.

This feature enables you to distill up to 16,000 words of content at a time into a succinct summary, a useful resource when dealing with extensive documents or large volumes of text.

Even more impressive, Jasper gives you the power to select the tone of your summary.

Whether you need an official summary for a business report or a casual summary for a blog post, you can customize the tone to fit your specific needs. Plus you can choose the number of variations you want i.e you can ask for one to ten summaries if you like.

This added level of control ensures that the output aligns perfectly with your desired style and context, making Jasper a versatile tool for any content-related task.

Jasper does not have a free plan, and it starts with the Creator plan at $39 per month.

However, this platform is one of the most powerful AI summarizer tools there is, and you can leverage it to write almost anything. Finally, if you’re looking for a collaborative text summarizer platform – Jasper is it.

6. Gimme Summary AI

If you’re looking for a simple Chrome extension for your summary generation needs, Gimme Summary is all you need.

It’s completely free and based on ChatGPT. The image below shows Gimme Summary in action.

Gimmy Summary AI works on any website, allowing you to summarize articles from various sources.

It’s worth knowing this summary generator remains free without any problems like compromising your data privacy or dealing with ads.

Using Gimme Summary AI is straightforward. After installing the extension, simply click on the extension icon to open the Summary window.

From there, activate the extension and hit the “Generate Summary” button. You will need a free account on chat.openai.com.

Once the summary is generated, you get a condensed version of the article’s key points. However, it is worth noting that it’s summaries are often too long and are not formatted. You’ll find it difficult to read.

It’s very limited when compared to the other tools mentiond here. You’re best served with the top tools mentioned in this post.

7. ChatGPT

While ChatGPT is not strictly a summarizing tool, it does have the ability to generate summaries from long text.

All you have to do is login and start a conversation. Copy and paste your text from a PDF, website, or book and add a prompt at the beginning. For example, you could type ‘Create a summary from the research paper below’. And follow this prompt with the text.

Another prompt could be ‘Summarize the following and create a bullet list of the key points’.

In this way, ChatGPT is great for text summaries.

How to Get Better Summaries from AI Summarizing Tools

Using the right prompts can significantly enhance your AI Writing Assistant’s summarizing abilities.

Whether you use ChatGPT or a premium tool with bells and whistles, you need to know what to achieve and how.

By giving your AI tool clear, concise prompts, you can guide it toward generating a summary that aligns with your desired outcome. Here are a few tips and examples on how to use prompts correctly or choose the right enhancements/option:

1. Be Specific: Instead of just saying “Summarize this,” provide more context to help the AI better understand your needs. For example, “Summarize this research paper, highlighting the main findings and conclusions.”
2. Mention the Format: If you want a bullet list instead of a paragraph, specify that in your prompt. For instance, “Summarize the following article into five bullet points, focusing on the key takeaways.”
3. Set the Tone: Some AI tools allow you to choose the tone for your summary. Ensure to specify whether you need a formal, conversational, or casual tone.
4. Use or Highlight Keywords: Particularly in tools that support keyword usage, you can guide the summarization process by highlighting important themes. For example, “Summarize this blog post with a focus on the benefits of healthy eating.”
5. Specify Length: If your AI tool allows it, you can request a longer or shorter summary as per your needs. A prompt could be, “Provide a brief, one-paragraph summary of the following report.”

Remember, the more precise your prompt, the more useful the generated summary will be.

It’s worth noting that many of the premium tools listed at the top of this article enable such refinements as changing the tone and word length. You just have to click the right buttons.

So, work with these tools and even invest in their premium subscriptions for better results. 

Conclusions

AI summarizer tools have truly changed the game when it comes to handling large amounts of text.

These advanced tools, powered by sophisticated AI models, make it easy to distill complex and lengthy content into concise summaries.

They not only save us time and effort but also offer a range of functionalities.

We can customize the tone of the summary and focus on specific themes or keywords.

This empowers us to extract the information we need, tailored to our unique requirements.

The benefits of summary generators are immense, from aiding academic research and business intelligence to boosting productivity in everyday reading and writing tasks.

So, don’t wait. Start experimenting with these tools today.

FAQs

How to summarize a long piece of text like a research paper, book, article, or something else? 

To summarize long-form text manually, you need to read through it. You may do this once and take notes while reading, or you may want to read twice. 

After reading and taking notes, look for the main points in the text. Figure out what the main message or lessons are. And write them down. Remove unnecessary content, examples, and so on. And you’ll have your summary. 

An alternative is to be smart and use an AI Summarizer tool. 

Why is summarizing important?

When you summarize content manually or with an AI tool, you’ll feel certain that you learned something and understood the post, paper, or story. 

Creating summaries also improves your memory and is a reference point in the future to recall information quickly. 

Also, summarizing content allows you to compare and contrast ideas from different sources to learn something new or important. 

What are the best free text summarizers? 

There are many free AI summarizer tools out there. Use QuillBot, Wordtune, Grammarly, or Gimme Summary to begin with.