Softonic

Text Summarizer

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This summariser uses extractive ranking: it scores each sentence by the frequency of its words across the whole text and keeps the top N. Extractive means the output is made of original sentences, not rewritten ones, so quotes, figures and names stay accurate. It is great for a first pass over a long article, meeting minutes, or a legal paragraph you have to digest quickly.

How to summarise a text

  1. 1

    Paste the source

    Drop in the article or document you want condensed. Plain text works best.

  2. 2

    Pick how many sentences

    Three is a good default for a one-paragraph summary; five to seven for a longer brief.

  3. 3

    Hit summarise

    Sentences are scored by total word-frequency weight and the top-N are kept in their original order.

  4. 4

    Review and edit

    Extractive summaries can leave dangling pronouns: spend 30 seconds smoothing transitions before you share.

How the ranking works

For each sentence, every word in it is scored by how often that word appears in the whole document. Sum those scores and you get a sentence score. The top-N sentences are then returned in the order they originally appeared, so the summary reads like a linear abridgement, not a greatest-hits reshuffle.

This is the classic Luhn-style approach from 1958. It is fast, deterministic and does not require any model or API call, which matters for pricing, privacy and reproducibility.

When extractive beats abstractive

Use case Prefer extractive Prefer abstractive (LLM)
Legal or financial paragraphs Yes, always Risky
Academic papers and methodology Yes Useful as a second pass
Meeting transcripts with action items Yes Useful for phrasing
Marketing copy you want rewritten No Yes
News articles you want shorter Yes Also fine

Tips for better summaries

  • Strip boilerplate (nav, ads, captions) before pasting. Frequency methods pick up on repeated navigation text and will waste slots on it.
  • Three sentences for a tweet-sized brief, five for an exec summary, ten for a document you still want to “read” quickly.
  • Very short inputs (under 5 - 6 sentences) do not need summarising, the tool will just return most of them.
  • If the output feels dry, feed it back in and ask the model in your head: what is missing? That is a better edit than cranking up the sentence count.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. It is a deterministic word-frequency ranking, not an AI model. The same input always produces the same summary.

No. Every sentence in the output is copied verbatim from your input. If you want rewriting, look at a paraphrasing tool instead.

The first sentence often introduces the topic with unique words, which can score lower than middle sentences packed with repeated keywords. Boost the sentence count by one and it usually reappears.

Yes for languages that separate sentences with ., ! or ?: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and most alphabetic languages work. Chinese, Japanese and Thai use different sentence marks, so the tool cannot split them into sentences and will return the text almost unchanged.

Your text is sent to our server to be summarised and is not shared with any third-party AI service. It is processed only to produce your summary.

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