Filed under: Internet, Web services, Web
Great Summary provides halfway decent summaries of long articles
At least that's the idea. In practice, the web service could use some more work. I tried it on several news articles from a number of different web sites, and more often than not, Great Summary decided that the tags or site navigation menus were worth dedicating a line to.
That said, the service did usually pick out some of the most fact-filled lines in an article, so it looks like the developers are onto something. If you don't care about story structure or narrative flow, Great Summary might be worth checking out. But I wouldn't exactly rely on it as a primary means of skimming the daily news just yet.
You can also use the service to summarize chunks of text that you copy and paste. Want to know how it handles this article? Read the summary after the break.
[via Lifehacker]
- I tried it on several news articles from a number of different web sites, and more often than not, Great Summary decided that the tags or site navigation menus were worth dedicating a line to. (0)
- That said, the service did usually pick out some of the most fact-filled lines in an article, so it looks like the developers are onto something. (0)
- Just copy the URL of an article that's so long you get exhausted by looking at it, decide how many lines of text you're actually willing to put up with (from 1 to 100), and push the summarize button. (0)
- Great Summary will find the most important points of the article, saving you valuable minutes, or even seconds of time. (0)
- Great Summary is here to help. (0)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Phazzer said 11:08AM on 11-29-2008
The summary of this article is actually pretty spot on. Seems like a fairly good service to me.
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El Taco said 11:08AM on 11-29-2008
lol, I only read the summary because the article was too big. Guess who will be putting this in his book marks :)
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KarlW said 11:08AM on 11-29-2008
Could somebody shove the last Harry Potter book in there?
I meant to read it, but couldn't motivate myself.
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anthony said 5:31PM on 11-30-2008
If using OS X, this is built in to the OS and works with every application. Highlight the text you want to summarize and select Summarize in the Services menu. You can also save the summarization and a separate text doc. TUAW just ran this tip on November 19th. Works surprisingly well!
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/19/mac-101-shorten-text-using-the-summarize-service/
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Jimmy said 4:40PM on 1-06-2009
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