Idea 021 - AI auto summarization / Auto cliffsnotes

2 minute read

This post is part of the 100 project ideas project. #The100DayProject. I am looking for feedback. Comment below or DM me via social media Instagram, Twitter.

One Line Pitch

Use AI to summarize large amounts of information into brief notes and key points

Description

Our world is becoming more and more complicated every single day. There is no stopping it. We need to make tools to help us manage the sheer amount of incoming data that we have to process every single day.

A email thread from a dozen people with hundreds of replies, A book with a few hundred pages, form posts that have 100s of replies, A twitter thread with a few dozen messages, project activity logs after returning from a few weeks vacation. Understanding and creating a summary of any large chunk of text can be time consuming to process, it often takes someone who “lived through the process” to be able to quickly understand all the important details of a subject.

We could make a service that takes a url to a large text subject and tries to reduce it to the smallest amount of key information as possible. Creating a summer of the whole body of text.

This could be a github issue, or forum bot that when a thread gets to be greater than 25 posts it automatically inserts a summary post.

You call it into a reddit thread or twitter thread by mentioning it and it will reply with a summary.

You give it an ebook and it tries to create a book review and summary of the text the best it could. In a way that you could use the summary when talking about the book to other people.

When you return from vacation, you point it at your unread email and it finds all the key information and extracts text from the emails giving you a good understanding of what you need to do.

If your equipment produces logs, or stats, this summary bot could read these large amounts of data, find abnormalities and produce a report at the end of the week of things that you should keep an eye out for.

Prior art

There are lots of examples of this service but I haven’t seen a good one yet. I don’t know if that is because the technology isn’t there yet or some other reason.

  • Quillbot - Top result for AI summary. It works with small amounts of text but is not built for threaded content from multiple sources.
  • Genei - Much better, built for research papers, and articles. Works surprisingly well.
  • Top 5 Best AI-Based Summary Generator - IT says that these tools exist but they are far from good. There is room for improvement.
  • Cliffs Notes - Human curatated but an example of how to do it properly.

Market

Anyone who needs to read a lot of text every day. Or needs to quickly understand a problem without reading hundreds of pages of text.

Everyone.

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