One hope for artificial intelligence is that it will enhance productivity by allowing us to process information faster. To that end, we tested nine AI text-summarizing tools, evaluating their ability to effectively shrink large texts into short blurbs or bullet-point lists. We found that Genei, Jasper, and ChatGPT Plus (the GPT-4 model) all provide the best summaries, with Genei leading the pack overall.
All three picks are impressive summarizers, tested across three different documents of varying lengths and complexity. Genei and Jasper were the most accurate, and Genei and ChatGPT Plus were the most versatile, capable of summarizing much larger documents.
If you feel uncomfortable handing over the summarization task entirely to an AI tool, Genei allows you to click on individual bullet points in its summary and then shows you where in the original document it got that information. This is particularly useful for fact-checking parts of the summary or jumping to specific sections of the document to read them in depth. The other tools require more trust. Read the full review at charterworks.com.
Our picks:
Genei
Overall, Genei is the strongest summarizer of the ones we tested. The Basic plan and the Pro plan performed similarly. If you’re just using Genei to summarize documents, we recommend the Basic plan.
PROS
- It provides very accurate summaries.
- It’s able to summarize large documents.
- You can click on individual bullet points in the summaries and it will highlight where in the document that information came from.
CONS
- There’s currently no business or team subscription plan.
- It summarizes at a slower pace than our other top picks. The Basic plan is faster than the Pro plan.
- The way it breaks up large documents isn’t always intuitive. For example, we gave it a PDF of a book, and it broke it up into a confusing mix of chapters and subsections of chapters. Ideally, it would have cleanly broken the book up into chapters.
ChatGPT Plus
ChatGPT Plus (GPT-4 model) is tied for second place. It’s highly versatile, adjusting outputs based on your feedback and letting you ask it anything about a document in question.
PROS
- You can install a plugin that allows you to upload large documents to summarize.
- You can adjust the summary to your liking by giving it feedback (e.g., “provide more details” or “shorten the summary to 200 words”).
CONS
- Its summaries were mostly accurate, but less so than our other top picks.
- Some of the facts in its summary were presented in a confusing order.
- Its initial reply can be long-winded and vague—we recommend specifying the length and level of detail you’re looking for.
Jasper
Jasper is tied for second place. It provides very accurate summaries, but it can’t summarize long documents and it’s expensive because of the other tools included in the cost. If you’re just looking for a text summarizer, this might not be the tool for you given the steep price.
PROS
- It provides very accurate summaries.
- It summarizes text very quickly.
CONS
- It can only summarize up to 16,000 characters at a time, limiting the type of documents it can work with.
- You have to copy and paste the text you want to summarize.
- Since the product includes a wide range of tools, it’s more expensive than the other top picks.
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