An AI summary generator can be a valuable tool for today’s teams. If, like me, you used to spend hours searching through meeting notes for key points, poring over documents, or filtering through PDFs, these tools are a godsend.
But it’s not just journalists and writers that can get a lot of value from these AI apps. Business leaders, marketing teams, sales staff, and virtually anyone else can save time with the right tool. And, as we all know – time is money.
The problem is that there are dozens of options, so how do you pick the best one? I tested around 50 of the top, most popular solutions around to bring you this list of my top picks for different summarization use cases. Let’s dive in.
What Is an AI Summary Generator?
An AI summary generator, or summarizer, is a type of AI tool powered by natural language processing (NLP) that generates short summaries of text. That text can include anything from PDF documents to meeting transcriptions and notes.
Essentially, they give you an easy way to distill content pages into something more concise and scannable. That’s ideal if you don’t want to spend hours reading through transcriptions or trying to find key points in a report. Some AI summary generators are already built into existing collaboration apps and UCaaS toolkits.
Zoom has a handy AI companion that can automatically create summaries based on meeting transcriptions, highlight action items, and identify separate speakers. Microsoft has Intelligent Recap, built into Microsoft Teams Premium, with personalized timeline markers and chapter options.
I use both of these tools pretty regularly. But for this guide, I’m going to focus on separate tools that you might want to explore if you’re not already using a platform with built-in AI for meetings and productivity.
I’ll also focus on tools specially designed for meeting summarization. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive AI meeting assistant with features like sentiment analysis or metric tracking, check out this AI assistant guide instead.
What to Look for in an AI Summary Generator
I’ll cover my top picks for the best AI summary generator momentarily. First, though, let’s walk through how I chose these options. You might have your own specific requirements to consider, but for the most part, I recommend narrowing down your choices based on the following:
- Extensive file support: Ideally, you’ll want your summary generator to work with as many different file types as possible, from meeting transcriptions to PDFs. The more files you can upload, the easier it will be to sort through all your data.
- Ease of use: An AI summary generator should make your life easier. Look for a platform that’s easy to use, with a straightforward interface and the option to customize your summaries based on your specific needs. Most will allow you to adjust length and tone.
- Integrations: I always recommend looking for AI tools that integrate with your existing solutions. Prioritize integrations with your favorite collaboration, productivity, and meeting tools, like Microsoft Teams, Webex, Salesforce, etc.
- Affordability: Most “free” AI tools are pretty limited in functionality, so I’d recommend giving those a miss. However, the product you choose should still be affordable. It might even include a free trial so you can test the features.
- Collaboration features: You’ll probably want to share your summaries with your team members and even edit them together, so look for simple sharing tools. Other integrated collaboration features, like comments and notes, can be handy too.
The Best AI Summary Generator: 10 Options
To create this list of the best AI summary generators, I dove in myself, asking the various tools to summarize a document (like a PDF), a report, or a video/audio recording.
1. Notta: Best AI Summary Generator for Recordings
Notta is an incredibly handy tool if you’re looking for a convenient way to draw insights from your latest meetings and interviews (like I usually am). It’s one of the most powerful options, integrating with tools like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex.
This convenient tool makes creating summaries with highlighted action items, chapters, and one-click sharing capabilities simple. It also supports 58 languages and can instantly transcribe conversations for you in real-time. Plus, if you need to transcribe a whole recording, it’ll only take about 5 minutes to summarize an hour of content.
You can upload URLs, documents, and even video files. Plus, you can use some handy AI templates to streamline the process based on your specific needs. There’s also a Chrome extension that allows you to transcribe audio from web pages.
Pros:
- Excellent support for a range of formats
- Powerful AI transcription and summarization, with action items
- Excellent Chrome extension
- Integrations with various business tools
Cons:
- Free plan is relatively limited
- Full summary generator is only available on the free plan
2. Hypotenuse AI: Best for PDF Summarization
If you deal with a lot of long documents, like PDFs brimming with product information or huge reports, Hypotenuse AI is an excellent choice. Although this tool specializes in AI content generation, it’s excellent for creating summaries of PDFs too. It can even adjust the format of your summaries, change the tone, or add bullet points.
Once you’ve uploaded a PDF to the platform, you can also ask the integrated AI chatbot questions about it. For instance, you might ask which terms were mentioned most often in the document or what the best statistics were.
You can generate multiple drafts of each summary, and there’s support for dozens of languages, too. Plus, this tool gives you plenty of export options. For instance, you can export your summary as a PDF or TXT file or publish it straight to WordPress.
Pros:
- Paragraph or bullet point summary options
- Excellent support for PDFs, web pages, direct YouTube videos, and more
- You can add images and links to your summaries
Cons:
- No free plan, although you can get a demo
- Paid plans can be quite expensive
3. Fellow: Best AI Summary Generator for Meetings
Fellow is another fantastic AI summary generator I’ve used a few times in the past. This powerful tool basically gives you an AI Copilot that automatically joins your meetings on channels like Microsoft Teams, and generates a transcript in real time. As it works, it summarizes your conversation into simple chapters, each of which includes an overview of key themes and points.
Based on the discussion, Fellow will pinpoint any important action items and which team members have been asked to complete certain tasks. Plus, Fellow embeds your searchable transcript, summary, and recording at the top of your notes so you can review them all later.
I love how flexible this tool is, too. You can connect it with more than 50 productivity tools, from Dropbox to Slack, and the solution is constantly updated with new features.
Pros:
- Excellent range of integration options
- Real-time transcription and summary features
- Excellent action items for task assignment
Cons:
- No free plan
- Limited customer support
4. Sharly AI: Best for Summarizing Multiple Documents
Most of the AI summary generator tools I reviewed force you to upload documents one at a time. But what if you need to summarize and draw points from many connected files at once? That’s where Sharly AI comes in. This tool promises to let you “chat” with any document you like.
All you need to do is drop a link or a file into the website, which will instantly generate a summary. You can even add multiple files at the same time, and Sharly will extract key points from all of them at once. It does take a little time to navigate everything, however.
You can access cross-document analysis, experiment with more than 50 types of documents, and even instantly share your documents with your team in multiple formats. Plus, the solution can extract citations from documents too. You can even customize the tool’s performance based on your goals.
Pros:
- Free plan for beginners
- Excellent for summarizing multiple documents
- Great chatbot features for asking questions about files
Cons:
- Slight initial learning curve
- A little slow at summarizing some files
5. Quillbot: Most Efficient AI Summary Generator
Quillbot is a pretty comprehensive AI writing solution. The platform offers a range of tools for everything from checking grammar to detecting AI in other forms of content. The paraphrasing and summarization tools are excellent at getting quick insights into documents.
Before summarizing content, your Quillbot assistant will give you keywords based on the text you input, in case you want to track them specifically. You’ll also be able to adjust the length and format of your summary, creating bullet points, paragraphs and more.
The downside is that the summarizer doesn’t currently support many languages. It really just offers different versions of English. However, it does allow you to summarize up to 1200 words for free, which is a lot more than you’ll get from most competitors.
Pros:
- Excellent for efficient and streamlined summarization
- Multiple style and formatting options
- Easy to use, with drag-and-drop and copy/paste features
- Generous free plan
Cons:
- No multilanguage support
- Extra tools cost more
6. SEMRush AI Summarizer: Best for Long Articles
Say you want to get all the key points from a pretty lengthy article (like this one), in an instant, SEMrush’s AI summarizer makes that a breeze. This free tool can generate summaries of paragraphs and reports in a single click.
While you don’t necessarily get a lot of advanced features, like the ability to change the summary’s tone, you can adjust summary length and pinpoint key action items. This tool also has no character limit, which is a nice bonus if you’re tired of being restricted by other apps.
Similar to Quillbot, SEMRush’s summarizer currently only supports the English language, but it has been upgrading its AI features lately, so that might change in the future.
Pros:
- Fast-paced and convenient tool for article summarization
- Excellent for both long and short-form text
- Available to use for free
Cons:
- No multilanguage support
- Limited file and upload options
7. AI Summarizer: Best for Quick Small Summaries
AI Summarizer is a very handy tool if you’re not looking for something that integrates with your existing productivity tools, like Slack. It’s not the most advanced tool I’ve reviewed, but it is one of the simplest to use, thanks to its handy Chrome extension.
You can add the extension to your browser and click a button to summarize all or some of the text on any webpage. Like most of the best tools on this list, the solution allows you to choose whether you want your summaries presented in paragraph or bullet-point format.
Of course, the free extension has some limitations, and it’s a little buggy. Plus, it still only uses ChatGPT 3.5, so the summaries you get might be lacking in a few basic areas.
Pros:
- Options to set summary length and format
- Free API key access
- Convenient Chrome extension
- You can add keywords when creating summaries
Cons:
- Very buggy at times
- You need an OpenAI account for the API key
8. Jasper AI: Best AI Summary Generator with Extra Perks
Jasper AI is one of the most popular tools on the web, particularly for marketers and content creators. This LLM-powered solution comes with various text generation and editing tools. You can even create your own audio with text prompts.
The summarizer included in the toolkit is very efficient. It effortlessly extracts all of the essential data from long documents in just a couple of clicks. You can even tell Jasper exactly what content it should focus on when creating your summary.
Jasper AI supports more than 30 languages and can answer questions about documents for you in a couple of seconds. It also allows you to customize every aspect of your summary, from the length and tone to the formatting. It is a little expensive for most users, though.
Pros:
- Excellent for creating customized summary
- Native Grammarly integration
- Lots of extra AI-powered tools to explore
- Highly accurate outputs
Cons:
- Expensive premium plans
- Extra features (like the plagiarism tool) cost extra
9. Wordtune: Best for Web Summarization
Like many of the top AI summary generator options I’ve covered here, Wordtune is actually a comprehensive AI writing tool which includes summarization as a feature. It can rewrite sentences and paragraphs for you and help you create more compelling content.
The summarizer tool allows you to give the app all kinds of text, from PDFs to video links, and the AI system will summarize everything for you in a couple of seconds. This is one of the most versatile tools I’ve tried, suitable for summarizing everything from audio to blogs.
You can also translate any content into up to 10 different languages. Plus, Wordtune integrates with Gmail, Microsoft Word, Slack, and various other tools.
Pros:
- Versatile range of format options
- Excellent one-click exporting capabilities
- Free extension for Google Chrome
- Easy to use
Cons:
- Very limited free plan (3 summaries a day)
- You may need to edit the output text
10. Any Summary: Best AI Summary Generator for Audio
Any Summary does exactly what it says on the tin. It lets you summarize any file – and I mean any file – with ChatGPT. Unlike most of the options I’ve covered so far, this solution supports URL uploads, MP4 files, .Wav files, PNGs, JPGs, and so much more. That makes it ideal if you host many long meetings and interviews and aren’t using a tool like Microsoft Copilot already.
The platform is set up a little differently from most of the other options, but it’s very intuitive and easy to use. All you really need to do is drag the file you want to summarize into a box, and the AI system will do the rest.
Plus, you can customize summaries with bullet points, quotes, and paragraphs and ask the system to highlight the most important points from your conversations. The biggest downside is that you can only summarize English language content.
Pros:
- Reasonably generous free plan
- Easy-to-use interface for beginners
- Support for video, text, and audio files
- Exceptional speed
Cons:
- No multilanguage support
- Can occasionally encounter technical issues
Check out the Best AI Summary Generators
Personally, I know I’d waste a lot more time in my day if I didn’t have an AI summary generator to help me sort through huge amounts of content and meeting transcripts. These tools really are a fantastic way to boost your efficiency and productivity in the workplace.
The ten options above are just some of my favorite choices, but remember there are plenty of other tools to explore. You might even already have a summarization solution built into your existing toolkit. Zoom, Google, and Microsoft all offer access to AI tools that can summarize meetings and threads for you.
If you don’t have access to AI in your current productivity apps, I’d recommend taking a few of the above options for a test spin. Most offer free trials or demos, so you can see for yourself, which is best for you, before you need to pay for anything.
FAQs
Is there an AI for summarizing?
There are countless AI tools available to help you summarize text, PDFs, transcriptions, audio, and video. Some productivity tools, like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, already have these features built-in. Great alternative options include Notta, Jasper, SEMRush Summarizer, and many others. Check out our complete article for insights into the best tools.
Is there a free AI summarizer with no limit?
Most AI summarization tools will impose limits on how much text you can summarize with a free plan. However, the SEMRush summarizer doesn’t have any character limits, allowing you to summarize as much as you like for free. Unfortunately, you will only be able to summarize English language text, and file upload options are limited.
Can ChatGPT summarize a PDF?
Technically, ChatGPT can summarize documents for you. However, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid version of the app (ChatGPT Plus) to access this feature. Once you upgrade, you’ll be able to drag and drop your document into ChatGPT, and ask it for the information you want to extract from the text.
