We’re excited to introduce our newest tool: Summate.it. With just one click, Summate.it gives you an immediate summary of the article you’re interested in, letting you quickly decide if it’s worthwhile reading the full article.
The internet is full of great writing, but it’s also rife with articles filled with fluff or crafted solely for clickbait. The primary goal of many publishers isn’t to provide you with deep insights or an enjoyable reading experience; it’s to generate revenue. To achieve this, they churn out content to get clicks, thereby boosting their site engagement numbers and increasing ad exposure. The article itself is a distant thought.
At FiveFilters.org, we work on tools to improve the reading experience. With Summate.it, we hope to save you time by presenting an article’s key insights and letting you decide which ones are worth investing more time in.
What do people think?
We launched Summate.it as an experiment earlier in the year and it was very well received. It was discussed on Hacker News, and recommended in Sifted, in their article titled “productivity hacks VCs and founders can’t live without.”
“I put in several papers I am familiar with that are long and complex and got back reasonable sounding summaries. Impressed.”
Hacker News comment
“I can quickly review a large number of articles on the web and identify the most important points and insights.”
Virginia Bassano, VC investor at Eight Roads
“Simple and clean AI article summary project”
AI Breakfast
How to use it
The easiest way to use Summate.it is to install our new Chrome extension. (We’ll have extensions for other browsers available soon too.)
Once installed, you can use it in two ways:
- Click on the extension’s toolbar button whenever you load an article that you’d like summarized.
- Alternatively, right-click on the page and choose Summate.it from the list of options.
Prefixing summate.it/ in the URL
If you’re not using Chrome, you can edit any article you’ve loaded in your browser (whether on mobile or laptop), and add summate.it/ to the beginning of the address.
For example, load the Media Lens article shown above, and tap or click your address bar to reveal the URL:
https://www.medialens.org/2023/head-trapped-descartes-dawkins-hobbes-marx-mill-darwin-and-the-myth-of-western-civilisation/
Go to the beginning of the URL and prefix it with summate.it and a slash:
summate.it/https://www.medialens.org/2023/head-trapped-descartes-dawkins-hobbes-marx-mill-darwin-and-the-myth-of-western-civilisation/
You can also add this after the http URL scheme:
https://summate.it/www.medialens.org/2023/head-trapped-descartes-dawkins-hobbes-marx-mill-darwin-and-the-myth-of-western-civilisation/
Copying and pasting the article URL
Lastly, we also let you paste in an article URL on the homepage of summate.it too.
Summaries in your language
The latest version of Summate.it now translates summaries to your preferred language (as set in your browser). So if your preferred language is French, Summate.it will try to generate summaries in French.
You can always click on the source article language (‘anglais’ in the example above) to get the summary in the original article language. Alternatively, with a free account, you can set the default to always be the source article language.
Subscription plan
We are delighted that so many people have found value in Summate.it. However, as the user base grows, so do our operational costs. To manage this, we have recently limited free access to the service. After summarising a few articles, you’ll be asked to create a free account. The free account lets you generate 10 summaries each month. To summarise more, you’ll need to become a subscriber.
The subscription plan costs ~$3/month when paid annually or $5/month when paid monthly.
To subscribe, first sign up for a free account and then click the Upgrade button from your account page to become a subscriber and enjoy unlimited summaries.
Push to Kindle access
A subscription will also give you premium access to our Push to Kindle service. And likewise, new and existing Push to Kindle subscribers get premium access to Summate.it too (use the same email address you used when subscribing to Push to Kindle).
How it works
We use our own article extractor along with OpenAI’s GPT service to create the summaries.
API access
If you’re a business or a developer and want to incorporate web article summaries into your product, please check out our API page.
Feedback
We’d love to get feedback from you. If you have any suggestions, or if you encounter any difficulties using the service, please don’t hesitate to get in touch or post on our forum.