Tool review: Summarizer
I've added Copernic Summarizer output to some of my recent posts. It's a fabulous tool recommended to me by Joe Rotello that I am using more and more. Here's how I use it.
Often when I am browsing I come across a long article that I'm not sure I want to read. If I have it in front of me I can click the summarizer button on the IE toolbar and let it go to work. If it's a link on a page I'm on I choose "Summarize target" from the context menu. Summarizer also has a live in-browser summary option.
Summarizer opens and downloads the page. It does a statistical analysis of the text to determine the key concepts. Then it works backwards to identify the sentences that are most important in the document based on those key concepts. It presents this as a summary list. At this point I can read the summary, email it or print it. I can also save it as an XML document (using Copernic's summary XSD scheme).
I get to control how large or small the summary generated is using a simple controls like 10% of the text or 200 words and Summarizer will adjust the summary as I do so. I can also remove concepts and have Summarizer re-jig things to reflect the new order of things.
I was a little skeptical at first but that quickly changed when I saw the quality of summaries it was generating. I usually use the 10% summary as a quick precis, then 25% for a little better understanding. If it seems worth it I then go on to read the whole article.
Summarizer also plugs into Adobe acrobat, Office and a number of other tools. For those not directly supported you can summarize text copied to the clipboard or dragged onto it's system tray icon.
There are things I would like to see developed for this product. For example there is no easy way to jump from a summary line to that line in the original document (to obtain context) and the in-browse live summarizer seems a little buggy to me. But all-in-all I think this is a great tool for the information professional and well worth $60.
[Note I am not affiliated with Copernic in any way, I'm just a satisfied customer]
ยป As a taster here is a 100 word summary of this posting:
- If I have it in front of me I can click the summarizer button on the IE toolbar and let it go to work.
- It does a statistical analysis of the text to determine the key concepts.
- Then it works backwards to identify the sentences that are most important in the document based on those key concepts.
- For example there is no easy way to jump from a summary line to that line in the original document (to obtain context) and the in-browse live summarizer seems a little buggy to me.
- But all-in-all I think this is a great tool for the information professional and well worth $60.