Free AI text summarizer

The format changes what the summary is good for, not just how it looks.

• Paragraph keeps the logic of the original: what happened, why, and what follows. Use it for articles, essays and anything where the reasoning matters as much as the conclusion.
• Bullets is the best fit for meeting notes, long email threads and reports. You get four to seven markdown bullets, easy to paste into a document, a ticket or a chat message.
• TL;DR is for triage. Run a long newsletter or a forwarded thread through it to decide whether it deserves your attention, and use a longer format only for what does.

If one format is not quite right, run the same text again in another. Each run is independent, so it costs you nothing but one of your daily runs.

The tool is instructed to use only information that appears in the text you pasted. It does not look anything up, open links inside your text, or fill in background it thinks you might want.

That is a deliberate limit, and it has two consequences you should know about:

• It cannot summarize a URL. If you paste a link instead of the article, there is no text to work on. Copy the article itself, or use the extension, which reads the page you are on.
• It can still get emphasis wrong. A summary reflects what the model judged central. If your text buries the point in a late paragraph or a table, check that the summary caught it.

Treat a summary as a map of the text, not a substitute for it, especially for contracts, medical information, financial documents or anything you will act on. Read the source for those.

This page handles text you paste. Two other kinds of source have their own, better-suited routes:

• YouTube videos. YouTube summary in Copilotly reads the video you have open and answers questions about it, so you can ask for the key steps, a timeline of arguments or the one claim you care about instead of a fixed summary.
• PDFs, Word, Excel and CSV files. Chat with PDF lets you upload a document and ask questions about it, which works better than pasting for long reports because you are not limited to 6,000 characters.
• The page you are reading. In the extension sidebar, chat can read the current web page, so you can ask for a summary without copying anything.

The extension opens with Alt+C. It is available for Chrome, Edge and Firefox, with other browsers listed on the download page.

The free tool stops at 6,000 characters per run. For something longer, split it at natural breaks - chapters, headings, speakers - and summarize each part. Then paste the part summaries together and summarize those. This two-pass approach usually gives a better result than one pass on a very long text, because each part is read in full.

If you do this often, a chat with a premium model is easier: paste or upload the whole document, ask for the summary in the shape you want, and follow up with questions. The free Copilotly plan includes 10 premium-model messages a day, and Pro removes that cap.

A summary is often the first draft of something else: a status update, a reply, a note to your team. Once you have it, you can change the register with the tone changer, reword it with the paraphrasing tool, or turn the bullets into a message with the email writer.

What makes a good summary?

It states the main point first, keeps the supporting points that carry the argument, leaves out examples and asides, and adds no opinion of its own. The Purdue OWL describes a summary as a shorter version in your own words that covers only the main idea.

How is a summary different from a paraphrase?

A paraphrase keeps all the detail in new words; a summary drops detail. Want the same length in new words? Use the paraphrasing tool. Want the gist? Stay here.

Can I trust an AI summary?

Trust it for orientation, verify it for decisions. A summary can drop a caveat or give a minor point too much weight. Read the original for contracts, health, money and anything with a deadline.

Summarize an email thread before you reply

Paste the thread, take Bullets, and look for open questions and dates. Then draft your reply, or hand the bullets to the email writer with a note on what you want to say.

Summarize reading for study notes

Do it section by section so each summary stays faithful to its section. Then write your own overview. If you reuse wording from a source, cite it; the APA guidance applies to paraphrase and summary alike.

Make a summary readable for others

A summary for colleagues should be scannable. Run Bullets, then smooth the wording with the tone changer or aim for plain wording as in the plain language guidelines.

Emphasis drift

A summary reflects what the model judged central. If your text opens with background and puts the decision in the last paragraph, the summary may lead with the background. Skim the end of your original for the real point.

Lost qualifiers

"Could reduce costs" and "reduces costs" are different claims. Bullets in particular can flatten a hedge into a fact. Check any sentence you plan to repeat to someone else.

Dropped numbers and names

Summaries shorten by cutting detail, and detail is often a figure or a name. If a number matters to your decision, search the original for it rather than trusting the summary to have kept it.

A two-minute check

Read the summary, then skim your original for anything with a date, an amount or the words "but", "unless" and "except". If the summary does not reflect those, add them by hand or rerun in Bullets.