The internet is full of interesting and important information just waiting for you to read it. The internet is also full of meaningless junk that’s a lot more fun to look at, leaving us little time to actually do the reading we know we should do. Well, thanks to technology, you don’t need to read entire articles or reports to benefit from their knowledge. Instead, turn to AI to summarize it all for you.
Wordtune Read summarises any text you throw at it
You can accomplish this feat with my most recent AI discovery, Wordtune Read. You might know Wordtune from its Grammarly-like AI writing assistant, but its Read feature is a whole other beast. The web app will take just about any document you have and quickly summarize it in front of you. You can upload PDFs from your computer, paste a link to an article online, or paste text from a document you have on-hand.
Once you feed Wordtune Read something to summarize, is scans the document, distilling what it thinks are the most important aspects of each paragraph into smaller, more digestible bullet points. From my testing, it doesn’t take many liberties; most summaries lift words and sentences from the source verbatim, but the AI might reorder some of them to fit the flow. As with ChatGPT, you can watch Wordtune Read work as it moves through the document, so it isn’t instantaneous. It doesn’t have to be, though: By the time you finish reading one bullet point, you’ll have more to review, until Wordtune Read has gone through the entire text.
You don’t have to take the app’s word for the accuracy of its summaries, either. Hover your cursor over a bullet point, and you can see where Wordtune Read found that information in the original source. That feature makes the entire experience for me, as it helps alleviate concerns about the quality or accuracy of any given AI summary. If something is off, you can see why instantly.
If you’re not happy with any particular bullet point, you can tell Wordtune Read to re-summarize it, although this option mostly just rephrases the same summary in a different arrangement. The AI might not think there’s another way to say what it wants to if the source is limited, and might spit out the exact same bullet point anyway.
Putting Wordtune Read to the test
When you first make an account, Wordtune Read already has an example for you to view. It takes the Wikipedia article for information overload, itself a small wall of text, and breaks it down as you’d expect. Of course, I wanted to test it myself. To start, I pasted a link to an article from The New York Times labelled as a 10+ minute read, as well as uploaded a 36-page elementary educational study, both of which Wordtune Read had no trouble summarizing as it did in its Wikipedia example.
While the summaries were helpful, they did illuminate a weak point in Wordtune Read. Because it’s pulling directly from the source, it really isn’t great for summarizing dramatic or narrative articles or stories. It gives you sentences from the story as if they were facts, and cuts in and out as it would any other information, which sucks any life out of the writing style and experience. Ideally, the AI would scan the story and distill only the facts, cutting out any narrative material altogether.
But that’s not how Wordtune Read was designed. Instead, the bot copies and pastes the bits of information it believes are the most essential throughout the text. That means it’ll read great for cut and dry articles and papers, but less so for narrative works. If you know that going in, you can use it accordingly.
Wordtune Read is free, but limited
Unfortunately, Wordtune Read’s free tier is a bit limited, only offering three scans per month. That isn’t a problem if you know your way around free trials, but if you want the premium experience, that’ll cost you $US119.88 ($166) per year, or $US24.99 ($35) per month. With that, you get unlimited document length, priority processing, and priority support, but I never had any problems when testing the free version.
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