When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn The best AI summarizer can process large amounts of information quickly and turn long-form content into key points and ideas. These tools can help with speed reading, digesting large amounts of information before a deadline, or creating short teasers of content to see whether you should read the full version.
You might have noticed the overwhelming range of new AI summary generators hit the market over the last year. I’ve tested and compared the industry-leading summary generators based on their unique features, interfaces, pricing, and accuracy to help you find the best one for your needs and budget.
The Best AI Content Summarizers Tested by Our Experts
HubSpot — Best Business AI summarizer tool for sales, content marketing, and customer service teams
Scalenut — Best AI summarizer for SEO content generation
Simplified — Best AI summary generator for social media content
The Top 8 AI Summary Generators Ranked
- Jasper AI — Best AI to summarize articles
- HubSpot — Best Business AI summarizer tool for sales, content marketing, and customer service teams
- Scalenut — Best AI summarizer for SEO content creation
- Quillbot — Best free article summarizer for students
- PictoryAI — Best summarizing tool for YouTube videos
- Writesonic — Best AI PDF summarizer tool
- Simplified — Best AI summary generator for social media content
- Paraphraser.io — Best AI article summarizer and rewriter
- Show Full Guide
What Should You Look for in an AI Summarizer?
With so many tools to choose from, it can be difficult to know which AI summary generator is the best fit for your project. During my hands-on testing with the best AI summarizer tools, these were the factors I looked out for:
- Features — Does the provider only produce summaries or does it also offer other text generation, SEO, editing, image, and audio features to make it more worthwhile?
- Language Model — Is the tool using GPT as its baseline, or is it utilizing a customized Large Language Model (LLM) to organize, classify, and translate your text? If it is using the former, I’d recommend that you choose a tool that uses OpenAI’s GPT4 model or higher.
- Accuracy and Quality of the Summary — Are the summaries accurate enough the first time? Was the tool able to capture the correct context of the original document? I also looked for tools that could retain specific keywords or phrases when sumarizing, while also being able to simplify the text.
- Customizations — Does the tool offer multiple summary formats to suit your preference, including the length, or whether it’s in paragraphs or bullet points?
- Ease of Use — How simple is the tool to use, understand, and navigate? Was it easy to integrate with your other software and how easy was it to upload your copy or document?
- Integrations — The seamless integration of the AI summarizer tool with file sharing, productivity and social media tools and apps will make it much easier to share, store, and organize content summaries
- Value for Money — How expensive is the AI tool? This also includes what each plan offers versus the price you pay – does upgrading to a higher-tier plan add enough additional value?
- Multiple Langauges — While this may not be relevant to all users, a few of the top AI summarizers are able to read, interpret, and rephrase text in numerous languages. This is handy for quick translation of large amounts of text, or just to summarize it in your preferred language.
The Best AI Summary Generators Reviewed
I’ll explore each of the top AI summarizer tools in greater detail to help you choose one that best suits your needs and budget.
- The release of HubSpot’s Breeze AI on September 18th. This is a comprehensive suite of AI tools and copilots designed for use by sales, marketing, and customer service teams. This includes content assistants that can help with content generation and summarization for marketing and communication.
- The release of Simplified’s new Video Captions feature. This allows social media content creators to quickly add subtitles in a range of styles and languages to their video summaries.
1. Jasper AI — Best AI to Summarize Articles
| Starting Price | $39/month |
|---|---|
| Free Version | Trial |
| Top Features | Multi-lingual, Intelligent chatbot interface, Specify any part of text to summarize |
What’s new from Jasper? When I updated this page in October 2024, I found that Jasper hasn’t added any noteworthy product updates other than small bug fixes since July 25th, 2024, when it announced a feature development within its editor.
This addition will allow users to easily generate reproducible outputs by saving them as templates or “Favorites.” This makes it easy to stick to a brand style guide and can vastly speed up content creation.
Pros 
- Highly accurate summary outputs
- Uses a chatbot to interpret writing commands
- Native Grammarly integration
- Huge range of AI text-generation tools
Cons 
- Plagiarism tool costs extra
- No free forever plan
2. HubSpot — Best Business AI Summarize Tool for Sales, Content Marketing, and Customer Service Teams
| Starting Price | $15/seat/month |
|---|---|
| Free Version | Free Tools Available |
| Top Features | Content repurposing, Performance reports, Customer service |
What’s new from HubSpot? At its annual INBOUND conference on September 3rd-4th, 2024, HubSpot launched its new Breeze AI. One standout feature of Breeze AI is that it can quickly summarize elements within your CRM, such as a customer record, contact details, or company information. This can help you locate the information you need more efficiently.
The HubSpot platform is used by thousands of businesses globally to help them nurture customer relationships across the entire custom lifecycle, all the way from from new lead to paying customer, and beyond. I chose HubSpot for this list as I’ve been increasingly impressed by its commitment to enhancing its platform with AI over the last year, with the comprehensive Breeze AI suite of tools being the latest release.
With HubSpot, you can use AI tools to instantly create executive summaries of performance reports and performance analytics or to condense long-form content so you can repurpose it for shorter-form platforms like social media. You can also summarize customer information or customer service interaction histories into concise records that can help you interact more personally with them in future conversations.
Pros
- Summarizer tool is extremely flexible across sales, marketing, and customer service
- Recently updated AI model (as of September 2024)
- Slick, easy-to-use interface
- Seamless integration with HubSpot marketing, sales, and CRM tools
Cons
- Currently only available in English
- Not suitable for non-business users.
3. Scalenut — Best AI Summarizer for SEO Content Creation
| Starting Price | $19/month |
|---|---|
| Free Version | Trial |
| Top Features | Generates multiple variations, Highly integrated with SEO tools, Variable output lengths |
What’s new from Scalenut? Scalenut hasn’t introduced any significant product updates apart from minor bug fixes since May 16th, 2024, when it introduced a Link Manager.
This feature assists with an important aspect of effective SEO content, which is internal linking. It identifies opportunities within your article to link to existing external content to enhance backlinks and improve linking between your own pages, demonstrating the relevance of your content to Google.
I chose Scalenut for its combined capabilities of AI-driven, Natural Language Processing-backed content summarization and SEO optimization tools. This allows you to create well-structured, clear summaries of complex content which you can then rework based on its ‘content grading’ feature and helpful SEO prompts to ensure maximum visibility of the content on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Pros
- Summary tool outputs multiple drafts
- Integrates with a whole SEO tool suite
- Dedicated summary generation tool for granular control
- Keyword planner assists in building content from summaries
Cons
- Summary tool is a standalone template
- Character limit on summarizing tool
4. Quillbot — Best Free Article Summarizer for Students
| Starting Price | $8.33/month |
|---|---|
| Free Version | Free Plan |
| Top Features | User-friendly summarizer, Real-time summary length change, Quillbot toolchain integration |
What’s new from QuillBot? In an article posted on its blog on August 9th, 2024, QuillBot highlighted its improved AI detection tool. It’s able to detect AI with less bias compared to other tools, and it’s completely free. QuillBot’s tool addresses the issue of cultural bias in AI detection tools. For example, some tend to mistakenly identify writing by non-native English speakers as AI-generated text.
Quillbot is a powerful AI-assisted writing tool that offers a range of functions, including paraphrasing, grammar checking, and plagiarism detection.
It offers a free summary generator that generates paragraphs summarizing the core points of your text. You can also upload Microsoft Word documents to summarize.
Pros
- Summarizer tool offers multiple output styles
- Statistics readout
- Changes to your summary take place in real time
- Lots of additional writing tools
Cons
- Could have more output types
- Less advanced with long-form content writing
5. PictoryAI — Best Summarizing Tool for Summarizing YouTube Videos
| Starting Price | $19/month |
|---|---|
| Free Version | Trial |
| Top Features | Video transcription and summarization, Automatic caption generator, Subtitle generator |
What’s new from PictoryAI? In its latest edition released on September 17th, 2024, PictoryAI introduced 17 new text styles. This gives you more flexibility and variety when adding summaries to your YouTube videos. You can also customize the summary styles to make them totally original.
Pros
- ‘Scene detection’ ensures video summarization is accurate
- Beginner-friendly user interface
- Cloud-based AI tool that works on Mac and Windows
Cons
- High starting price
- Struggles with more complex scripts
6. Writesonic — Best AI PDF Summarizer
| Starting Price | $16/month |
|---|---|
| Free Version | Free plan |
| Top Features | PDF summarizer, Multi-lingual text summarizer, Ad copy and product descriptions |
What’s new from Writesonic? When I updated this page in October 2024, Writesonic hasn’t released any major product updates other than small bug fixes since its last update a year ago. Its last update included valuable features such as a Citation Generator, a Social Media Plan Creator, and an Improved Article Rewriter.
Pros
- Easy-to-use, interactive AI PDF summarizer
- Tons of SEO-informed features
- AI model uses live Google research
- Chatbot rivals ChatGPT and Claude
Cons
- Sharp increase in pricing between standard and advanced template plans
- Overly complex for a text summarizer
| Starting Price | $24/month |
|---|---|
| Free Version | Free plan |
| Top Features | Creative text summarizer, Blog ideas and outline, Caption generator |
What’s new from Simplified? On September 2nd, 2024, Simplified announced its latest Video Captions feature. Once you’ve generated a video summary, social media content creators can use this valuable feature to quickly add subtitles in a wide range of styles and languages. This can help boost accessibility and readability when posting video content to their followers.
Pros
- Free forever plan available
- Works across design, writing, and social media
- Suitable for business and personal use
Cons
- Requires sign-up even for free tools
- Generated content can be repetitive
8. Paraphraser.io — Best AI Article Summarizer and Rewriter
| Starting Price | $9/week |
|---|---|
| Free Version | Limited free version |
| Top Features | Simple text summarizer, Article rewriter, AI essay writer |
What’s new from Paraphraser.io? When I last updated this page in October 2024, Paraphraser.io hasn’t released any major product updates other than small bug fixes.
Pros
- Text summarizer is free and simple to use
- Plagiarism detection
- Offers 24/7 chat support
Cons
- No citation generator like Quillbot
- Interface is very basic and not user-friendly
The Best AI Summarizers Compared
I’ve created a concise summary of the key features, price points, and other relevant information concerning the top AI summary generator tools, including a plagiarism checker and translation capabilities.
| AI Summarizer | Jasper AI | HubSpot | Scalenut | Quillbot | PictoryAI | Writesonic | Simplified | Paraphraser.io |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Premium, feature-rich tool | Businesses; sales, marketing & customer service teams | SEO content | AI paper summarizing for students | Video Summarizing | PDF summarization | Social media content | Paraphrasing articles & essays |
| Starting Price | $39/month | $15/month | $19/month | $8.33/month | $19/month | $12/month | $10/month | $9/week |
| Free Version | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Plagiarism Checker | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Translation | 30+ languages | ❌ | 25 languages | 45 languages | 29+ languages | 25+ languages | 25 languages | 20+ languages |
How Does an AI Summary Generator Work?
An artificial intelligence (AI) summarizer analyzes text using NLP techniques to highlight the most important points. Once you’ve copied over your chosen text into the editor, the AI tools use an algorithm to evaluate the sentences and prioritize them based on factors such as word frequency and semantic relevance.
The sentences are ranked according to importance and arranged in a logical flow. You can customize the length and style of the summary according to how you prefer to read information, whether that’s in a paragraph or bullet points.
The Latest Updates From AI Content Summarization Tools (News Bulletin)
- October 2nd, 2024: A writer and journalist for CNET reported on her many attempts to summarize an entire book with ChatGPT. She reported the experiment was unsuccessful due to the AI chatbot’s built-in anti-plagiarizm protection and the need for extensive prompt engineering to get anywhere close to a well-rounded, accurate AI summary.
- August, 2024: Copilot in Microsoft Word allows registered users to summarise chats over a specific period of time. This means you no longer have to manually scroll through extensive chat history to find the information you need. You can use a time-based phrases (like ‘yesterday’, or ‘six months’) to prompt the depth of the summary you want.
- August 26th, 2024: As part of Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro updates, subscribers can now can now upload Google Sheets, Google Docs, CSVs, and PDFs, as well as Excel and Word files from Google Drive on their own devices. By doing this, users will have assistance with research and writing tasks and be able to generate presentation-ready charts from lengthy documents.
- July 23rd, 2024: Meta has released LLaMA 3.1, an open-source model optimized for tasks such as text summarization. The aim is to provide a strong alternative to proprietary AI models.
- June 21st, 2024: Claude 3.5 Sonnet is released. Anthropic’s latest model raises the bar with its state-of-the-art processing and intelligence. It’s available for free on Claude.ai and can be used for even more sophisticated summarization tasks.
Are AI Summaries Plagiarism Free?
While AI summarizing tools do produce unique text, you’ll need to learn how to recognize plagiarism. Since the tool extracts sentences directly from your source text, the ideas, structure, and tone may follow that of the original author.
This won’t be a problem if you’re only using the tool as a research assistant, or as a way to speed through your reading list. The issues arise if you were to publish the summary as your own work.
If you want to publish the summary as part of your own project, you should definitely paraphrase the output before doing so to avoid plagiarism.
Is it ethical to use AI content summarizers?
Techopedia believes that AI content summarizers can generate accurate and legitimate summaries, but human fact-checking and editing are still crucial.
AI content summarizers are ethical when used for personal use but not when used for repurposing other writers’ work and claiming it as your own, which is essentially plagiarism.
While it can be a valuable tool for research, it’s not advisable to directly publish AI content summaries online in order to preserve the quality and integrity of your writing.
What About AI Podcast Summarizers?
Our testing framework for the best AI summarizer tools focuses mostly on text and video summarization. We do cover tools with AI audio summarizer features, but we’re starting to investigate the best AI tools for podcast summarizing specifically. The best AI podcast summarizers are designed for the exact niche purpose of rounding-up podcast content, with features such as:
- Automated Summarization: concise summary generation based on natural language processing (NLP) that extracts the salient information
- Highlight Extraction: the tool recognises the highlights and key points and includes these in the summary
- Chapter Marking: chapter sections are flagged for easy navigation through the podcast episode
- Customizable Summary Length: users can control the length of the output, from super-short flash summaries to more in-depth roundups with more colour and information.
- Integrations: it integrates well with social platforms or notetaking apps for seamless activity across all of them
- Social Sharing: linked to the above, it allows users to easily share their AI generated podcast summaries and their own thoughts on various social platforms.
Some of the most popular AI podcast summarizers on the market today are Snipd, Podz, Summari, Abridged, and Castro.
The Benefits of Using an AI Summary Generator
The three main benefits of using AI content summarizer tools are:
Using an AI summary tool can help busy individuals quickly go through extensive reading material, providing invaluable assistance to those working under tight deadlines.
If you want to grasp the main ideas in a text but don’t have the time, need, or interest to read the whole piece, using an AI summarizing tool can provide a shortcut to understanding the main points.
If you’re struggling with a complex subject, an AI summary generator can provide a simplified version of the topic, making it easier for you to understand.
It’s important to weigh up all the benefits and risks of using AI summarizers before you begin using them regularly. Here’s my list of the main pros and cons I could identify.
Benefits of Using AI Summarizers
- Time-saving: You can quickly condense lengthy texts into concise summaries, and gain back hours of time.
- Increased efficiency: With the time you’ve won back from avoiding reading chunky texts, you can focus on more brain-intensive tasks
- Consistency: AI tools will generate summaries with consistent formatting, meaning your notes will be meticulously organized and free from human errors.
- Translation: You can quickly and easily translate texts into other languages, meaning you can understand foreign texts in your native language.
- Customizable outputs: Generate summaries in the way you prefer to understand information, whether it be paragraphs or bullet points, the choice is yours.
Risks of Using AI Summarizers
- Loss of Nuance: AI may miss subtle details or the context that a human might find important. With certain disciplines, especially in creative fields, this may lead to huge oversights.
- Inaccuracy: Similarly, summaries can sometimes misinterpret the source material, especially in foreign language texts, leading to misleading or inaccurate conclusions.
- Over-reliance: Depending too much on AI summaries could reduce your own critical thinking and comprehension skills.
How to Use AI to Summarize Text — A Quick Guide
Here's a step-by-step guide on how to use QuillBot to summarize text.
Navigate to QuillBot's Summarizer
From QuillBot’s homepage, you’ll easily find its range of tools, including the summarizer, a grammar checker, AI detector, and a plagiarism checker.
Enter Text
On the left-hand side of the editor, you can paste the text you want to summarize. You can also select keywords to guide QuillBot on the parts of the text that are most relevant to your project. It’ll base the summary around this.
Summarize
Then hit the ‘Summarize’ button and your results will appear in the right-hand side of the editor. You’ll also get the chance to paraphrase the summary if you want to change the wording.
Shorten the Summary
If you want to streamline the text, you can use the slider at the top of the editor to adjust the length of the summary. You’ll have to regenerate the results to see the new summary.
Change Format
If you prefer to read information in a bulleted format, you can also reformat the summary into this style. Use the settings at the top of the screen to adjust the model of the summary. You can also create a custom format according to your preferences.
FAQs
Can AI summarize a PDF?
What are the limitations of an AI summarizing tool?
Are AI summarizers reliable?
What file formats do AI summary generators support?
Can I use an AI Summarizer to Shorten my College Essay?
References
- Building Scalable, Explainable, and Adaptive NLP Models with Retrieval (SAIL Blog)
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) (United States Department of State)
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Plagiarism (SJSU Research Guides at San José State University Library)
