A good summary is worth a thousand words (or several). The bottom line is that while reading something cover to cover has its merits, you sometimes have no time for it. There are other scenarios in which the person writing certain things is knowledgeable of the topic, but they’re not very skilled with words. They’re not good at summarizing things, which makes them make digressions, use complex explanations to explain simple terms… and lose most of their audience along the way.

Thanks to the current state of AI and NLP (natural language processing), you can use an advanced tool to create your own summaries. While understanding why this is useful should be pretty easy, here are some reasons that you might not have thought of.

1. Increasing productivity

The first thing you must understand is the purpose of getting an AI summarizer tool. If you just need a summary of a text on rare occasions, chances are that you could do it with virtually any tool out there. Even ChatGPT and a copy-paste option should be good enough.

However, if you need it professionally or academically, you might want to look for a more specialized tool. Since you’re spending hours upon hours doing research of all sorts, this will save you a lot of time and keep you better informed. The latter part is especially important since it allows you to make better decisions and increase the accuracy of your work overall.

It also makes you more self-reliant and less likely to find yourself in a scenario where people misquote an important piece of a document, and you just take it for granted.

Most importantly, the consistency of the quality of these summaries will increase many times over. Why? Well, mostly because there are no biases or dependence on the competence of the person making the summary.

Just keep in mind that if you are using it for work, you should be able to calculate the platform's ROI (if it’s a paid tool). At the same time, you need to be more careful when picking the tool since it suddenly becomes a matter of personal choice rather than a business decision.

Ideally, you would find a list with identified top options for 2024 and do a bit of research on which of the tools fits your needs the best.

2. More efficient research

The first thing you must understand about AI summarizers is that they drastically increase your and your team's research capabilities.

First, it increases accuracy. Instead of relying on unverified data, you can get the source document and ask for a summary. This way, you can check the data's validity without spending hours reading the actual file.

To some, this may sound like a simple time-saving tip, but it’s not. The reality of the matter is that the difference is not between spending 30 minutes reading the summary or several hours/days reading the original document. The difference is between reading the summary or not touching the document at all.

You have no idea how strong some people's aversion to reading and doing actual research is. In the past, they would have been doomed to failure, but today, they actually have a chance of making it.

This type of comprehensive research will increase the quality and reliability of your work by quite a margin; you just need the right tool.

This is not just useful when it comes to generalist research. Even in day-to-day use, you can find an application for such a tool. Let’s say you want to improve your conversational skills or learn more about luck-based games (odds and strategies) that you can later apply to your adventures with anonymous casinos. There are whitepapers and studies on these issues published in volumes, and a summary could help you develop an understanding more quickly than would otherwise be possible.

3. Saving time

In the previous section, we’ve mentioned the fact that it’s not just about time-saving. Well, that’s actually not true either. Sure, there are some people who won’t read things that are too long, and having an AI summary will allow them to get at least some info from the primary source.

At the same time, some people do read. They have to read; however, this takes a lot of time. You see, making an estimate of how much time this would take is not that easy to make either. Just think about it this way: it doesn’t take the same amount of time to read through a short story or an informal blog post in order as it would take a news article.

According to some estimates, an average reading time is roughly 250 to 300 words per minute, which means that you would read a 1,000 wall of text in about 3-4 minutes. On the other hand, a news article has more data that you have to fit into the story, which means that it takes more attention and it would take you 4-5 minutes (on average).

It doesn’t stop there. An academic journal article is much more complex, and you’ll be happy if you manage to get through 150 to 200 words per minute. This means that an article of 1,000 words would take you between five and seven minutes.

Then, if you’re reading a technical manual or a quarterly report, the same size of text would take you 7-10 minutes (at 100-150 words per minute).

Now, imagine going through texts several times or taking notes. Summarizer makes all of this easier and cuts time shorter.

4. Content curation

From the very start, you can use these platforms to identify relevant information sources. This will help the quality and long-term reliability of your content quite a bit.

If you’re covering a report or a piece of news, having a tool that can summarize it will be of great help when you are making an outline. Sometimes, it’s easy to lose track, especially when you have to condense a huge report or a complex piece of news into a smaller format.

Another rather massive advantage of using the AI summarizer lies in checking just how clear your wording is. You see, as a content creator, you know exactly what you want to say; however, this is why you can sometimes misread what you actually wrote.

If you know what the sentence was supposed to say, you, as a creator, will read it as you intended to write it, not as you actually wrote it. This is why even the most literate and meticulous of authors outsource proofreading.

With a summarizer, you’ll see if the message is clear, as an AI text processing tool cannot read minds; it can only interpret meaning from what is written. More importantly,

Lastly, the majority of these tools are also used in content creation, which means that businesses are already using them. In other words, it’s a tool that will have more than just one use, which significantly improves the ROI in your favor.

AI summarizer is a handy and versatile tool

The bottom line is that the capabilities of AI summarizers are so numerous that it’s hard to imagine a field where it wouldn’t be useful. They can break down complex papers, help you rework ideas that are too confusing, and overall make sure that everything is worded as it should be. As such, it’s of use to both individuals and organizations for all sorts of matters.