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Text Summariser Free — Shorten Text Online

Long articles, reports and notes take time to read, and often only a few sentences carry the point. A text summariser pulls those sentences out so you can grasp the argument in a minute instead of half an hour. This free tool is an extractive summariser, which means it works by choosing sentences from your own text rather than rewriting them. It counts how often each content word appears, scores every sentence by the words it contains, and keeps the highest-scoring sentences in their original order. Because it copies your sentences word for word, the summary never invents facts or changes a number — but it also cannot explain an idea in simpler words. Everything runs in your browser, so your text is never uploaded to a server, and there is no account to create and no limit on how much you summarise. It works best on plain paragraphs of factual writing: articles, reports, essays and study notes, where the main ideas are repeated in different words across the text.

How to Use

1. Paste your text. Copy an article, report, essay or set of notes into the box. The tool needs at least a few full sentences to work with — a single sentence cannot be shortened, and two or three sentences give it very little to choose from.
2. Choose how short the summary should be. Set the number of sentences you want, or move the percentage slider to keep a share of the original sentences. For a quick overview, 25 to 30 percent is a good starting point; for a very short version, ask for two or three sentences.
3. Click Summarise text. The tool counts the content words, scores every sentence, and shows the highest-scoring sentences in their original order. The counts below the summary show how many sentences and words were kept.
4. Copy the summary. Use Copy summary to put the result on your clipboard, then paste it into your notes, email or document. Read it once before you rely on it, because an extractive summary keeps only what was written and can drop context the author assumed you already knew.

Worked Example

Click Load sample text to see the summariser work on a short paragraph about saving money. The input is six sentences: "Saving money starts with paying yourself first, before spending on anything else. A simple budget shows where your money goes each month, so you can spot waste and cut it. Cooking at home instead of eating out can save a family hundreds of dollars every month. An emergency fund protects you when your car breaks down or a bill arrives unexpectedly. Small automatic transfers move money into savings every payday without any effort. Tracking every dollar you spend makes saving easier because you see the leaks." Ask for a 2-sentence summary and the tool returns exactly these two sentences, in their original order: "Saving money starts with paying yourself first, before spending on anything else. A simple budget shows where your money goes each month, so you can spot waste and cut it." Here is why. The tool counts content words, ignoring common words such as the, a, and, you and every. The words money, saving and month appear most often, so sentences containing them score highest. The sentence scores are 12 for the first sentence, 13 for the second, 10 for the third, 8 for the fourth, 10 for the fifth and 9 for the sixth. The two highest scores are the second sentence at 13 and the first at 12, so those two are kept, in original order. The fourth sentence scores lowest at 8 because its content words — emergency, fund, protects, car, bill — appear only once each. If you asked for 3 sentences instead, the third or fifth sentence, both scoring 10, would join them.

Why Extractive Summarising?

There are two ways to shorten text. One is to rewrite it in fewer words, which needs a language model and usually a paid service. The other is to pick the most important sentences and keep them exactly as written, which is what this tool does, and it has a real advantage: accuracy. Because every sentence in the summary is copied from your text, it cannot invent a statistic, misquote a person, or change a date. The trade-off is that the summary reads like a set of highlights rather than a smooth rewrite — sentences may jump between points, and a sentence that only makes sense with its neighbour can feel abrupt on its own. That is normal for extractive summaries, and it is why you should read the result before you share it. For most everyday jobs — getting the gist of an article, condensing your own notes, or pulling the key points from a long report — the highlights are exactly what you need, and they cost nothing and leave your text on your own device.

Tips for Better Summaries

Give the tool enough text to work with: ten or more sentences is a good minimum, because a few sentences give it little to choose from. Clean up the text first if you can — remove headings, captions and navigation text pasted by accident, since those fragments can score oddly and crowd out real sentences. Try two lengths and compare them: a 30 percent summary shows you the shape of the argument, while a 3-sentence summary shows you only the headline. If the summary misses a point you care about, that usually means the point was stated only once, in words the text never repeats; in that case, copy that sentence in by hand rather than asking for a longer summary. Finally, remember what the tool cannot do: it cannot explain a difficult passage, it cannot combine two ideas into one sentence, and it cannot tell you whether the original text is true. Use it to find the important sentences faster, then read those sentences yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions