Day 8 – Summarize Anything In Seconds – 30 Day AI Challenge 2024

Welcome to the 2024 Edition of the #30DayAIChallenge. This year, we’ll be focusing on making Generative AI more accessible for all. So follow along and give each challenge a try yourself, plus share your own thoughts and experiments with a community of like-minded learners and tinkerers!*

Week 2‘s theme is “The Fast and the Curious: AI Drift“, focused on productivity and designed to help speed up tasks, plus reduce time spent on the mundane, both at work and home.

Today’s Challenge: Summarize Anything In Seconds

In today’s fast-paced world of information overload, time is precious…and the ability to quickly understand and assimilate vast amounts of information is more valuable than ever. Day 8 of the 30 Day AI Challenge presents an exciting opportunity: harnessing the power of Generative AI to summarize any content, from dense articles to sprawling novels, in mere seconds. This challenge taps into a little known superpower of Large Language Models (LLMs), i.e. summarization!

Getting Started: A Beginner’s Guide

For beginners, diving into AI summarization might seem daunting, but it’s more accessible than you might think. Here’s how to get started:

1. Choose Your Tool: Start with user-friendly AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini, which can generate summaries based on the text you provide. There are also specialized summarization tools and apps that can condense articles, papers, and more.
2. Understand Your Content: Briefly skim your content to get a general idea of the topic. This will help you provide a more focused prompt if the tool requires it.
3. Craft Your Prompt: Be clear and concise. For example, you could say, “Summarize this article in three sentences focusing on the main points.”
4. Experiment and Refine: Your first summary might not be perfect. Experiment with different prompts and see how slight changes can affect the outcome.

Remember, the goal is to capture the essence of the content without losing crucial information. Keep your prompts direct, and don’t hesitate to ask for summaries from specific angles or on particular topics within the content.

Practical Example 1: Summarizing A Long Story

In this brief video demo, I used Google Gemini to paste in a long multi page fairy tale, asking Gemini to summarize it…all it took was a few seconds (footage not sped up in any way).

Practical Example 2: Summarizing A PDF Document

Various AI Chatbots can now directly read PDFs, plus you also have various free or paid off-the-shelf tools that use APIs to do the same thing. In the demo below, I provided Claude a PDF report by McKinsey and asked it to summarize the key points:

Practical Example 3: Summarizing A Video

This is an amazing superpower GenAI can give you when you want to get the gist of a really long video before watching it…or get a quick summary of key points from a video you’ve just watched. I use this all the time in my own workflow. In this example I used ChatGPT, which offers both plugins as well as custom GPTs that can do this for you. Alternatively, you can also copy-paste the video transcript (if available) for a quick summary.

Practical Example 4: Summarizing Foreign Language Signs, Restaurant Menus And Documents Using Just A Photo

This one is amazing when you’re travelling and don’t understand the local language very well. All you need to do with any chatbot that is multimodal (i.e. supports different forms of input/output like text, images, audio, video) is to provide a picture and ask for a translation or a summary. In the below example from a trip to Europe, I took a photo with my phone of the restaurant menu, simply asking ChatGPT to recommend what dishes would be best for certain dietary preferences.

Practical Example 5: Understanding T&Cs No One Reads

Ok, admit it…when was the last time you actually read the Terms & Conditions for a website, software produce or even service before you hit “Accept”? For all we know, we could be signing our lives away… Kidding aside, now you don’t have to settle for not knowing. Just copy-paste the T&Cs (or upload the PDF) to your favourite LLM chatbot and let it tell you what it all means…or even ask questions about what matters most to you. Here’s a quick example, where I used the Midjourney T&Cs to query Claude on usage rights.

Advanced Techniques: Elevating Your Summarization Game

Advanced users can delve deeper into the technicalities of AI summarization to enhance accuracy and detail:

1. Custom AI Models: Explore training custom models on specific types of content for more tailored summaries. This requires understanding of machine learning and access to datasets.
2. API Integration: Integrate summarization APIs into your applications or workflows for on-the-fly summarization of content, enhancing productivity.
3. Advanced Prompting Techniques: Learn to use advanced prompting techniques, like specifying the desired summary’s style, tone, or even asking for summaries optimized for different audiences.

Advanced users should also be mindful of biases in AI-generated summaries and continuously evaluate the reliability and accuracy of the summarized content.

A great example of an advanced use case would be using enterprise grade setups to allow company users to search (with natural language) for content on their intranets as well as consumer facing websites. Gen AI can do a great job of supercharging search to make it feel a lot more natural and intuitive. Similarly, you can create a secure repository of documents, contracts and policies to help users find, summarize and obtain quick answers to their questions.

Wrap Up: The Future of Quick Summarization

As Generative AI technology continues to evolve, the potential for instant, accurate search and summarization will only grow. This capability will not only save time but also make information more accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or field of expertise. The challenge of summarizing anything in seconds is just the beginning—imagine a future where AI helps synthesize complex information into customized, digestible insights tailored to each individual’s needs and preferences. I can’t wait! 😄

If you give this a try, leave a comment and share your experience or creations! If you’re using other platforms, please tag your Facebook, Twitter / X or LinkedIn post with #30DayAIChallenge so others can find it too.

Till tomorrow…

*Please note: Participation in the 30 Day AI Challenge is at your own discretion and responsibility. Always ensure that no sensitive personal information, confidential, or proprietary company data is shared. Adhere to all applicable local laws and company policies. Enjoy exploring AI responsibly!