Best 10 AI Summarizers for Fast and Accurate Insights [2024]
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As knowledge workers, we deal with vast amounts of information daily—from research papers and meeting transcripts to lengthy YouTube videos. In this case, distilling key insights quickly has become a necessity.
That’s why I’ve been excited about AI summarizers. These useful tools can condense a 50-page document or 1-hour audio in minutes, giving back valuable time for other important tasks.
After a week of in-depth testing, I’ve compiled a list of the 10 best (free and paid) AI summarizers you can utilize to extract critical points from large volumes of text with ease. Let’s dive in!
Notta — Best for transcribing and summarizing audio/video
Eightify — AI YouTube video summarizer
Hypotenuse AI — Best for summarizing PDF
ChatGPT — Most versatile summary generator
HubSpot — Best for summarizing customer interactions
Semrush AI Summarizer — Best for summarizing long articles
Frase — Free AI summarizer for short-form content
BooksAI — Best for summarizing books
Scholarcy — Best AI summarizer for academic fit
Grammarly — Best for content creators and writers
What to consider when choosing an AI summarizer?
When choosing an AI summarization tool, I looked primarily at the factors below to determine which apps made it to this list:
Accuracy: The most important factor is how well the summarizer distills complex or long text into concise summaries without losing the core meaning. During the test, I assessed how well each tool captured the essence of the original document.
Ease of Use: An intuitive and user-friendly interface can make a significant difference in your overall experience. The tool should be easy to navigate, with minimal learning curve, even for first-time users.
Integrations: A great summarizer should fit seamlessly into the rest of your workflow, so I've included the summary software that integrates with other tools you already use (such as CRM systems, note-taking apps, or productivity suites).
Customization options: Some AI summarizers allow users to customize the length and focus of the summaries. If you need more control over what is emphasized in the summary, look for tools with adjustable settings to meet your specific needs.
Data security: Given that these tools require uploading maybe private documents, it’s important to ensure that the summarizer has strong data security measures in place.
Top 10 AI summary generators for all use cases
To find the best AI summary generators, I tested each tool by asking it to summarize a prepared text or audio. In this section, we’ll explore each automated summary software, showcasing their strengths, weaknesses, and pricing so you can make an informed choice.
#1 Notta — Best for transcribing and summarizing audio/video
Notta is an AI-powered notetaker that first transcribes your audio and video into searchable and accurate transcripts, then generates a concise summary from the lengthy transcripts. Whether you’d like to summarize a YouTube video, a user interview, a meeting recording, or a podcast—the Notta AI summarizer is your best choice.
For those who use YouTube as a source of information, Notta is a real game-changer, especially when you're not sure if a video is worth watching.
Once the summary is ready, you can make edits and share it to email or Slack to give others a quick heads-up. And the best part? The summary comes with timestamps that link to the exact part of the recording, allowing you to easily reference the relevant sections without having to sift through the entire audio.
Here is an example of transcribing and summarizing the OpenAI DevDay 2023 speech to give you a better idea of how Notta excels: https://app.notta.ai/share/3800ec89-1e5a-48c6-bb68-37621821e415?lang=en-US&t=4f9bdb69bc18251a62b9d1bccf1509b6
Key Features
Record and Transcribe Conversations: Use Notta to record and transcribe the meetings, interviews, lecture and so on, so you can start focused without missing important details.
Transcribe Audio/video Files: Simply upload the recording or paste a Google Drive/YouTube URL, you will get an accurate transcript in minutes.
Summary Templates: Notta provides pre-defined templates to fit your needs. Simply select the template and watch as Notta transforms your raw notes into polished, concise summaries.
Wide Integrations: Notta integrates with popular workplace tools like Notion, HubSpot, Google Drive to automate your workflow.
Pros
Your date is 100% safe with Notta as it complies with SOC 2, GDPR, and other international regulations.
Notta can pull out action items from the transcripts, making follow-up much easier.
We’ve done so many tests and the summary is always accurate; you can even write an AI prompt to extract only the information you need.
Notta supports over 50 languages.
Cons
Currently, it doesn’t support customizing the length of the summary.
The generated summary is sometimes too detailed.
Pricing
Free Plan that allows you to enjoy AI summary for 10 times.
Pro Plan: $14.99 per user per month
Business Plan: $27.99 per user per month
Enterprise Plan: Contact Sales
Notta AI meeting assistant records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings so everyone can stay engaged without missing a detail.
#2 Eightify — AI YouTube video summarizer
Eightify is an AI-powered tool that lets you summarize YouTube videos in seconds. Its usage is simple: install the Eightify extension, navigate to any YouTube video, then click the summarize button, and voila, a summary is generated in minutes. You then copy the summary text or share it with others via a link.
Key Features
Timestamped Summary: Eightify includes specific time markers indicating when key points or events occur. This allows you to quickly locate and reference important information.
Customized Length: This tool offers three options: Short, Auto, and Detailed. You can choose one that best fits your needs.
Multilingual Support: Eightify supports 40+ languages, including but not limited to English, Chinese, French, and Spanish.
Pros
It is available on Chrome Extension, iOS and Android.
This tool provides a top comment overview to see if people like you found the video useful.
Cons
The AI app is only limited to YouTube videos.
The summary will always have 8 bullet points, sometimes not aligning with the user intent.
The free plan lets you generate only three free weekly summaries for 30 minutes or shorter videos.
Pricing
Download Eightify from the Chrome Web Store for free.
Paid Plan: $4.95 per month
#3 Hypotenuse AI — Best for summarizing lengthy PDFs
If you are looking for something more advanced, Hypotenuse AI might be a great option. It's a simple and powerful AI PDF summary generator that lets you automatically generate summaries of lengthy PDFs in paragraph format or bullet points. As an added bonus, Hypotenuse AI also offers other tools like HypoDoc, Ask AI Anything, HypoArt, and more. The drawback, however, is that there's no free plan available.
Key Features
Generate Multiple Drafts: With Hypotenuse AI, you can customize the number of drafts you want to generate.
Multi-language Support: What I really like about the AI text summarizer is the ability to work with many languages like Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, and even Japanese.
Various Export Options: The generated summary can be exported as PDF, DOCX, and even TXT files. It even allows you to publish the summary directly to WordPress.
Pros
With Hypotenuse AI, you can generate a summary in two forms: in paragraphs and bullet points.
It supports summarizing PDFs, web pages, and even direct YouTube videos via URLs.
Hypotenuse AI even allows you to upload images or embed links to the summaries.
Cons
There's no free plan available — not yet, at least.
The free trial comes with a limited amount of credits.
It sometimes makes mistakes or produces content that lacks originality.
Pricing
Individual Plan: $29 per month
Teams Plan: $59 per month
Enterprise Plan: Custom Pricing
#4 ChatGPT — Most versatile summary generator
As long as you’ve read tech news in the past year, you must have heard of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot and virtual assistant built on language models by OpenAI.
ChatGPT can answer your questions and deal with input information intelligently, thus making it a powerful text summarizer. You only need to input the text and use a general prompt like 'Summarize the text in 200 words.' You can also refine the prompt to meet your requirements.
Even though ChatGPT is an easy-to-use AI summarizer tool, it only supports text-based input. If you want to summarize files in document formats, such as TXT, Microsoft Word, and PDF, you'll either have to use API or look for other AI document summarizers in our list.
Key Features
Process Long Text Documents: ChatGPT understands and processes long text documents. Hence, it makes it suitable for large amounts of information.
Versatile: Whether you want to create short paragraphs, lists, or bullet points, ChatGPT can help in summarizing.
Identify Key Points: ChatGPT gives the gist of a long document by highlighting key points within a few minutes.
Pros
You can further adjust the summary by using different inputs.
The plugins and extensions available extend ChatGPT's functionality.
Cons
ChatGPT may generate inaccurate summaries, especially if the context is unclear.
It requires significant training to ensure it gives the right output.
Pricing
Free Plan
ChatGPT Plus: $20 per month
#5 HubSpot — Best for summarizing customer interactions
There are several tools for summarizing blogs, YouTube videos, and more. But what about the customer interaction? Insights from customers are liquid gold for any business, especially for sales professionals. With HubSpot AI Summarization, you can summarize customer interactions in email, chat & calls. These summaries can be shared with anyone in your team or other teams as well. Spend time on more important tasks and cut down time that goes into manual note-taking. These summarized insights can help with marketing campaigns and ensure the marketing creatives are relevant to the target audience.
Your marketing team can create relevant content in less time, giving them enough time to generate quality leads. Even for multi-lingual target audiences, you can create content in their native language. Furthermore, for support teams, these summaries can be really helpful. Especially when a support agent transfers the chat to another agent, these summaries can bring the new agent to speed before addressing the customer.
Key features
Customer Summaries: Summarizes customer chats, emails, and calls
Detailed insights: Helps you create a bird's-eye view of your customer's journey
Pros
Saves time by cutting down on manual note-taking
Understand everything without reading through everything
Helps spot important stuff that might've been missed manually
Cons
Might miss nuances or context in complex conversations
This could make team members overly reliant on summaries
Accuracy might vary depending on the complexity of interactions
Pricing
Get started for free
Professional and Enterprise plans available
#5 Semrush AI Summarizer — Best for summarizing long articles
Semrush AI summarizer is a great option if you're looking for a genuinely useful and free summary generator. While some of the free apps I tested offer summary features, most come with a character or word limit — but Semrush is different.
The app doesn't over promise anything, but it definitely delivers some good results. In addition, the AI document summarizer comes with a 'no character limit' — meaning you can generate as many summaries as you want.
Key Features
Customizable Summary Format: Semrush offers two ways to shorten the text: either summarize in paragraph format or generate key highlights in bullet points.
Adjust Summary Length: With a simple slider, you can generate summaries in different lengths ranging from short, medium, and long.
No Character Limit: Unlike other tools in this list with certain character limitations, Semrush comes with no character limit.
Pros
With the robust summary AI of Semrush, you can extract the main idea of the concept and remove unnecessary text while generating the summary.
You can use Semrush for free — and that too, without worrying about the character limit.
It works well for summarizing both short and long-form texts and articles.
Cons
There's no option to summarize documents from your device or upload links.
Currently, Semrush AI summarizer supports only the English language — though they are planning to extend that.
It does not produce original content — instead, it cuts some sentences to reduce the length.
Pricing
Free
Let Notta AI transcribes and summarizes your online or in-person meetings, so you focus on other important tasks without missing a detail.
#6 AI Summarizer: Best for summarizing only the selected text
If it were up to you, would you summarize the selected text from a web page with the help of a free Chrome extension? If so, you might like AI Summarizer. It's a free extension that can be added to your Chrome — and lets you summarize all or some of the text on the web page. While you can generate summaries in paragraphs or bullet points with the free extension, it comes with certain limitations and is not perfect.
Key Features
Set Summary Length: AI Summarizer helps you adjust the summary length in words or characters — though it's not 100% accurate.
Summarize in Bullet Points: With the AI summary generator, you can even condense the information into a few bullet points.
Free API Key: It's a great tool where anyone can introduce their own API key from ChatGPT to generate unlimited summaries.
Pros
With the AI Summarizer, you can effortlessly summarize any web page.
If you don't want to summarize the entire page, the Chrome extension allows you to select any portion or fragment.
Simply adding the keywords lets you focus on specific topics when summarizing.
Cons
The free Chrome extension is currently in its first release — which is why it may have unexpected bugs.
You'll need an OpenAI account to create a free API key.
The tool does not come with any advanced features like real-time transcriptions.
Pricing
Free
System Compatibility
Chrome Extension
#7 Frase — Free AI summarizer for short-form content
Frase AI summary generator uses its proprietary AI model to help you generate informative summaries. You can input any article or passage, and the tool will start summarization.
Even though the tool is easy to use and works efficiently, it has a downside. You can only summarize the article if it has 600-700 words. Hence, it makes it less suitable for someone looking to summarize lengthy research papers.
Key Features
Quick Turnaround: The free AI summarizer tool condenses the content in minutes, helping you save time and effort.
Integrations: Frase integrates with Google Search Console, Google Docs, and WordPress.
Sentence Rewriter: This option lets you rephrase sentences instead of summarizing.
Pros
The AI summary generator lets you generate full-length, SEO-optimized content briefs in only a few seconds.
It is an easy-to-use tool with an ad-free and minimalistic dashboard.
It also has a free blog title, slogan, and meta description generator to ease content creation.
Cons
Sometimes the answer engine includes content from spam pages.
Frase does not offer a lot of customization options.
Pricing
Free Plan
Solo Plan: $14.99 per month
Basic Plan: $44.99 per month
Team Plan: $114.99 per month
#8 BooksAI: Best for summarizing books on Android or iOS
Most AI summary generator apps work well on Windows or macOS, but only a few of them are designed for mobile devices. BooksAI is one such simple and free AI book summarizer for smartphones that lets you summarize books in 9 different languages.
There are also three different summary types: detailed summary (which generates the summary of the entire book), spoiler-free synopsis (which offers some information about the book without disclosing the main ideas or climax), and chapter summary (which summarizes one chapter).
Key Features
Multi-language Support: BooksAI supports 9 languages like English, French, Italian, Dutch, and more — meaning you can even summarize books that aren't available in your language.
Different Summary Types: With the help of BooksAI, you can generate three types of summaries: detailed summary, spoiler-free synopsis, and chapter summary.
Digital Reading List: You can save your favorite books — and the books you'd like to read — directly to the digital reading list.
Pros
BooksAI is completely free to download and install the application on your smartphone.
This AI app is compatible with both iOS and Android devices.
BooksAI is mainly geared toward generating summaries of popular books and even offering recommendations.
Cons
If you are not a book lover, BooksAI might not be the ideal solution.
You cannot use the app on Windows or macOS, as the tool is designed only for smartphones.
The generated summaries sometimes miss the important points from the books.
Pricing
Free
#9 Scholarcy — Best AI summarizer for academic fit
If you like to generate a summary of the lengthy article, book, or research document you are planning to read, the Scholarcy summarizer gives you the space to do it. While testing different AI summarizers for this guide, I found Scholarcy to be a good option for lengthy documents — all thanks to its summary flashcard feature. With just a few clicks, Scholarcy generates key concepts, a summary, highlights, and an abstract.
Key Features
Summary Flashcard: Scholarcy is one such online summarizer tool that breaks down long articles, books, and reports into key concepts, highlights, summaries, and even an abstract.
Browser Extensions: Scholarcy has free browser extensions for Chrome and Edge that help summarize web pages directly.
Rob-Highlighter™: One unique feature of Scholarcy that I personally love is the Rob-Highlighter™. It works by quickly highlighting important phrases and contributions — without you having to read the lengthy documents.
Pros
Scholarcy also generates a background reading list by highlighting the terms and abbreviations in the text.
It provides various customization options: you can choose the number of words, the level of language variation, and the level of highlighting while summarizing.
The tables and figures of the summary can be easily extracted in EXCEL format.
Cons
You cannot import files directly from Google Drive, Dropbox, or RSS Feeds without a paid plan.
The tool might not be a good starting option if you don't have a flexible budget.
While Scholarcy has a dedicated enterprise plan, I think it is extremely pricey compared to other online summarizers.
Pricing
Browser Extension and Flashcards: Free
Personal Library: $4.92 per month
Academic Institution License: $8K+ per annum
#10 Grammarly — Best for content creators and writers
Ask anyone to name an AI writing assistant, and chances are they'll say Grammarly. Used by over a million people worldwide, Grammarly has long been the go-to writing and editing tool at most companies. If you're used to Grammarly for checking writing and spelling errors and are reluctant to invest in any other tool, you might lean toward Grammarly's free online summarizer tool.
Key Features
Writing Style: Grammarly has loads of customization options for writing style — formal, informal, or a mix of both — to tailor the generated summary as per your needs.
Rephrase the Text: GrammarlyGO (Grammarly's new generative AI tool) includes rephrasing the sentences in the editor.
Handy Browser Extensions: Grammarly for Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox provides real-time writing suggestions on different apps like Gmail, Google Docs, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
Pros
Grammarly lets you set the tone of the summary before hitting the generate button.
The editing and spelling checker ensures the summary is clear and mistake-free.
With Grammarly, you can set the formality, length, and tone of the text with just a few simple clicks.
Cons
While Grammarly summarizer is a good starting point, it takes a few minutes to condense even the shorter texts.
You need to sign up for Grammarly to create high-quality summaries of emails, articles, and business reports.
There's no option to transcribe audio or video files.
Pricing
Free
Wrapping up best AI summarizers
Whether you're looking to condense lengthy reports or pull key insights from meetings, the 10 AI summarizers I’ve reviewed here offer a range of solutions to fit various needs. Some include:
For summarizing audio/video, go for the Notta AI summary generator.
For summarizing lengthy text, Semrush’s AI summarizer is a good choice.
If you want a free summarization tool, try using ChatGPT.
All these tools can save you countless hours and keep you ahead of your ever-growing to-do list. It’s time to try them out and see which one works best for you.
FAQs about AI summarization tools
How does an AI summary generator work?
An AI summary generator works by using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to analyze text and highlight key points.
The tool identifies crucial points, such as main ideas and conclusions, and delivers a concise version that retains the essential information, saving users time while maintaining the text's core meaning.
Is there an AI that can summarize a PDF?
Yes, several AI tools can summarize PDFs by extracting key insights and condensing the content into shorter, more digestible summaries. Popular AI-powered tools that can summarize PDFs include ChatPDF, NoteGPT, and Hypotenuse as mentioned in this article.
Can ChatGPT summarize a video?
No, ChatGPT cannot process and summarize a video directly because it is a text-based AI chatbot, but it can help summarize the content of a video if you provide the transcript or key points from it. To summarize a video, I recommend using the Notta AI summarizer.
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