Reading through a document with lots of pages can be time-consuming and tedious, so is skimming.
You want to get quick facts and key points about an article, news story, book, or other information so you can decide what to do next.
A summary gives you a concise overview of the main points in the text you’re reading and is much shorter than the original text.
Maybe you’re required to show that you’ve understood a standalone assignment, or you want to make notes that will help you remember what you’ve read. In such cases, you need a summary of key points to get a clear understanding of the original source before paraphrasing or quoting it.
You can take the longer route of reading the entire document or material and creating your own side notes about what you’ve read. Or you can use a summarizer tool to do it for you.
In this guide, we’ll look at some of the best online PDF summarizer tools you can use for this purpose. Let’s dive in.
Best PDF Summarizer Tools
1. AskYourPDF
AskYourPDF is an AI-powered PDF summarizer for working with PDF documents, streamlining reading and data extraction.
AskYourPDF, driven by ChatGPT, enables users to upload PDF files and interact with an intelligent chat AI to extract valuable insights.
It supports various formats and provides a Chrome extension for easy access . Notably, it’s multilingual and doesn’t require sign-up for its free version.
This tool can generate concise summaries from PDFs and allows users to inquire about the summary. Additionally, it offers a chat function for interactive document engagement. The Pro plan supports up to 6000 pages per document (up to 90MB) and offers unlimited questions and conversations per day.
Moreover, AskYourPDF provides a ChatGPT plugin designed to expedite information extraction from PDF documents. The plugin accepts a URL link or a document ID and scans through stored PDFs to find answers or retrieve specific details.
AskYourPDF offers a free plan with limitations, including a maximum of 100 pages per document (up to 15MB), 50 questions per day, 3 conversations per day, and 1 document per day.
Check the latest plans and pricing here.
2. Summarizer.org
This summarizer tool also uses AI to generate summaries of your PDF files within seconds. The tool finds the important and best lines of your text and eliminates the time-consuming and tedious process of having to read and summarize lengthy documents or portions of text.
You can save time, make PDF files easier to read. You can focus more on what matters and make sure people understand the key takeaways from the material you share.
Once you open the platform, you can upload a PDF document and the tool will extract the most relevant information from the text in your file. It will then create a summary that includes only the necessary key points in less than five minutes.
You’ll get a condensed, short, and concise summary that you can use or share online for higher engagement. You can also set summarization length, customize your content to show bullets and best lines, and get the core meaning you want to convey through the summary based on the PDF you upload.
The summarized content won’t save in the system so no third party can use it.
You can also use the Summarizer.org Chrome extension, which focuses on making your content brief while keeping its wit intact. You’ll get the same features as the online tool and use it on any electronic device including your computer and mobile device.
Check the plans and pricing here.
3. Scholarcy
Scholarcy is another free online summarizer tool that scans your content and reads it within seconds. It then breaks it up so you can easily access and assess your file.
The unique Robo-Highlighter feature highlights important contributions and phrases automatically, so you don’t have to print a paper and go over it with a marker pen to highlight what you need.
Plus, the tool creates a referenced summary that summarizes the entire paper rewriting statements in the third person so it’s easier to cite the information correctly in your PDF file.
You can customize the summarization process by choosing the number of words, and highlighting and language variation levels.
Scholarcy will find the references in the PDF document and you can download them in a .RIS format or BibTex so you can import each entry into your reference manager.
You can also extract tables and figures in your PDF document and download them in Excel format to run calculations on the results.
Plus, you can configure Scholarcy to give you thumbnails of each figure in your document and jump to the corresponding numbers as you read through.
The tool is used by different people including professionals, students, or researchers to get points of their PDF documents quickly and get summaries they can revert to any time.
You can speed-read content, follow arguments, and even use the browser extension for free to get your file summarized while it’s open.
Check plans and pricing here.
4. QuillBot Summarizer
QuillBot is known for its paraphrasing features, but it’s also an online summarizer tool you can use for your PDF documents. You can take any text-based content and, in one click, you can get the important bits of the information.
The summarizer condenses lengthy documents, white papers, articles, research papers and other information to key points using AI’s natural language processing to find the necessary information and keep the original meaning.
You can summarize key sentences or paragraph mode. This way, you’ll get bullet-point lists of the important phrases or sentences, and unique paragraphs that summarize the content.
You can also manage the length of your summary whether it’s a news article, confusing paragraph, or research paper. You can also get the information you’re looking for from the summary.
Through AI-based algorithms, you can choose the important parts you want and check that the summary matches the original context.
Check out the best alternatives tools to QuillBot.
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5. Text Compactor
Text Compactor is a free online summarizer software that lets you summarize any part of your PDF document and set how much of the text you want to keep in the summarized version.
If you’re not happy with the result, you can change the percentage and try again.
The site doesn’t bog you down with adverts like other sites, and you don’t need to register to use it. You get a feature that translates languages and a slider to adjust the percentage of the copied content you want to keep in summary.
Text Compactor also delivers longer and more complex sentences but you can use it for your shorter PDF files instead and get summaries based on the most important sentences.
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6. SummarizeBot
SummarizeBot helps you save time and focus on what’s more important by summarizing your documents accurately. This way, it’s easier for you to digest big sections of text in compressed formats.
You can analyze the most important, interesting, and relevant information and know more because you’ll read less in the shortest time possible.
The chatbot analyzes your document – but you can also use web links or multimedia files – and extracts the main ideas into a brief, concise summary.
You can also structure unstructured data and get a better version of the text in your summary. The tool delivers the best summaries using native technologies and compresses the text so you can save the time you’d have taken doing research.
Whether it’s a PDF, mp3, DOC, TXT, JPG, or other types of files, you can use the SummarizeBot to deliver well-summarized content in many different languages.
7. SMMRY
SMMRY is an online PDF document summarizer that’s created to condense text and articles into accurate summaries. The main goal is to give you an efficient understanding of the text, which is done by giving you the sentences you need.
It does all this through its core algorithm, which ranks sentences by importance, reorganizes the summary to focus on keyword selection or topics, removes any transition phrase, unnecessary clauses, and excessive examples.
SMMRY gives you what you need to get the perfect summary as it provides a design that’s easy-to-use, has a wide range of features, and also has advanced settings. The web-based tool also summarizes any text you add into it or add from a PDF file or URL.
The tool also comes with a heat map that uses color to group sentences by importance, and you can ignore the questions, exclamations, or quotations.
The core algorithm summarizes the content by associating words with their grammatical counterparts, calculating how each word occurs in the text, and assigning points based on word popularity.
Next, it detects the periods that represent the end of a sentence, splits the text into individual sentences, ranks them by the sum of their words’ points, and then returns the most highly ranked sentences chronologically.
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8. Tools4noobs
Tools4noobs is a website that brings together useful widgets and scripts that anyone can use or add to their own sites. The free software allows you to summarize online articles by adding a URL or pasting the text onto the online platform.
You can summarize your PDF document by adding a URL to the document and you’ll get several intricate options that allow you to specify the summary you want.
You can pick a threshold from 1-100, and trim the summary based on the words the software finds or you can adjust how many lines you want it to show.
Alternatively, you can get the software to highlight sentences by their keywords and relevance, and enlarge the most common words in the document.
9. GetDigest
GetDigest is an AI-powered tool that simplifies web content and text documents by summarizing them, saving users time.
It operates akin to a human, skimming and summarizing information while disregarding extraneous details. It’s versatile, handling over 33 languages for multilingual documents.
For businesses, GetDigest offers in-depth document analysis, efficient data extraction, and enhanced information processing capabilities during the workday.
GetDigest’s technology supports various text formats, web environments, archives, and emails. It can summarize a 100-page document in just 5 seconds, providing additional features like revisiting previous documents, creating personal notes, and customizing Digest display settings.
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10. ChatGPT
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is an advanced AI language model capable of understanding text, generating content, and engaging in dynamic conversations resembling human interaction. It finds application in various tasks, including summarizing lengthy PDFs for better comprehension.
In the context of PDF summarization, it excels in extracting key points from text and crafting tailored summaries.
Nevertheless, ChatGPT lacks direct PDF processing capabilities. To analyze PDF content, you must first convert it to text and then provide the text to ChatGPT for summarization or analysis.
How to Summarize PDFs with ChatGPT:
- Convert your PDF into a text file using a PDF to Text converter.
- Log in to the official ChatGPT website and paste the extracted text into the message box on the homepage.
- Prompt ChatGPT with a request like “Write a concise and comprehensive summary of [insert text here]” or “Summarize the text above,” and await ChatGPT’s summary.
ChatGPT follows a freemium model, offering both free access and a premium subscription for advanced features.
11. TLDR This
This is a free web-based online summarizer tool that also provides a Chrome extension so you can summarize your content or text.
You can save so much time in reading long documents and get short bullet points from the content to make it easier for you to read.
TLDR This summarizes any document or article into easy-to-digest and concise content giving you time to focus on what’s important and free yourself from overwhelming information.
You can place a URL link of the document or paste the text in the box provided to start summarizing your content. You can also select the option whether to summarize using the basic type or advanced one and display keywords.
The tool automatically summarizes your document in one click without taking the painfully long time that you would to read the document manually. It then summarizes your text into five key bullet points using natural language processing (NLP).
It’s a simple yet handy tool that will help you spend less time reading counterproductive information and more doing work that’s valuable to you.
To start, just click the TL;DR button in the toolbar (on a Chrome browser) that you want to summarize, and the tool will generate a summary of fewer than five sentences right there.
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12. Text Summarizer
Text Summarizer is powered by AI and sums up long portions of text into shorter ones. You can get summaries of your text with key sentences that are an overview of the general copy.
You can upload your PDF document and the tool will convert paragraphs into one paragraph in one click.
Whether it’s for academic or educational use, the summarizing tool is accurate and efficient to make summaries of your document. The tool is built with advanced algorithms that work to understand your content and generates a summary without changing the meaning of the actual content to give you the best overview.
You can set the summarization percentage, and the tool will display everything in the format you want. This helps when you have a presentation you want converted into a quick bulleted overview for preparation purposes.
The tool also shows the ranking of your content and generates a sequence from the highly scored sentence in the top position. You can also see the best sentence with the highest score based on the tool’s algorithm and get the top sentences to use in your summary.
Once the summarizing tool understands your content, it picks the most appropriate sentences and scores them based on word selection, optimization, accuracy, and structure. It will then understand the importance of the sentences and gather them to make a summary that you can use.
Plus, it proofreads the summary automatically and picks up any errors, which you can remove on your own. The tool is widely used by students, writers, editors, press release writers, journalists, and other professionals.
Best PDF Summarizer Tools – Wrapping Up
Whether you’re working on research papers, reports or presentations for work or leisure, an online PDF summarizer tool is good to have.
You can get a quick and refined summary that contains the important bits of the document to share with others and create more engagement or whet their appetite to want to read it.
Any of these free online PDF summarizer tools can help you start your journey to summarizing long documents, save time, and eliminate the manual hassle of having to read through long documents.
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