Best AI Summarizers (2025)
Our skilled writers & in-house research team are behind the biggest cybersecurity stories, like The Mother Of All Breaches & WhatsApp Data Leak.
We closely analyze the services, check their features & openly share our testing methods with everyone.
Learn more
The rise of AI has brought about some useful tools, and document summarizers truly stand out among the best. They can transform long, dense content into easy-to-digest summaries, streamlining your workflow and freeing up your time for other important tasks.
Of course, these advantages only come with the best summary generator software solutions. To ensure you don’t waste time on subpar options, Cybernews tech experts and I have done the research on your behalf.
In this article, we share our findings – the best AI summarizer list, along with comprehensive reviews and analysis of these tools’ functionality, strengths and weaknesses, and features.
Top 10 AI summarizers shortlist
- Jasper AI – best customization capabilities
- Quillbot – ideal for crafting short-form summaries
- Notta AI – excellent audio transcriber
- Writesonic – top PDF summarizer AI tool
- ChatGPT – great choice for article summaries
- HubSpot – leading meeting summarizer AI software
- ClickUp – easy pick for users seeking to boost their productivity
- Scribbr – go-to AI summarizer for beginners and minimalists
- Eightify – best YouTube video summarizer
- Scholarcy – popular choice among students and researchers
What features should I look for in an AI summarizer?
Summarizing AI tools must offer a particular set of features to provide real value. I’ve listed the essential ones you should look for in your tool. Ticking all the boxes might be a challenge, but the closer you come to it, the better summaries you can expect.
- Accuracy: Your AI summarizer should be able to recognize the main points in any text, no matter how long or complex. It should deliver a clear, concise summary to help you make informed decisions without the extra effort.
- Flexibility: The best AI summarizing tools allow you to fine-tune the length and focus of the summaries. For example, you might need a detailed overview for a research paper but only a quick recap for an email thread.
- Compatibility: When dealing with various documents, you'll want a summary AI tool that offers multi-format support. It should handle PDFs, .docs, OCR, .rfts, multimedia, and other formats with the same level of accuracy and precision.
- Multi-language support: Your AI summary generator should handle multiple languages seamlessly. It shouldn’t matter if it's summarizing an English legal document or a German financial report – you must trust it’ll deliver consistent and reliable output every time.
- User-friendly design: Your AI tool should have a simple interface with little to no learning curve to meet your needs. Its job is to save you time, so you shouldn’t have to deal with complex settings or reconfigurations.
Best 10 AI summarizers reviewed
Now that you have all the basics down, it’s time to jump into the best AI summarizer reviews. Check out what the Crypronews team and I have uncovered about each one to help you make an informed decision.
1. Jasper AI: best AI summarizer for customized output
| Best for: | Customized output |
| Starting price: | $39/month |
| Free version: | No (only a 7-day free trial) |
| Top features: | Brand style, voice, and audience-tailored content, 30 languages supported, multi-format compatibility |
Jasper AI is a content generator that features an AI text summarizer. While this is only one of the many tools it offers, it’s impressively versatile.
It can handle 30 languages and many different document formats, including text, video, and audio. Yet, it doesn’t take more than a couple of clicks to receive a command and complete the task.
What really stood out to me the most was Jasper’s customization options. It can reflect your brand’s voice and style while tailoring its tone to cater to a specific target audience. Plus, it responds well to custom prompts, allowing you to fine-tune the output without much effort.
These benefits make it particularly popular with marketers and content creators.
2. Quillbot: best for short-form summaries
| Best for: | Short-form summaries |
| Starting price: | $8.33/month |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Top features: | User-friendly interface, adjustable paragraph and key-point summaries, free 1,200-word coverage |
Quillbot is a powerful, user-friendly summarizing AI tool. With just one click, it can condense text into either paragraphs or bullet points. It also lets you adjust the summary length with a slider, check for plagiarism, and highlight keywords.
Now, it doesn’t cover video and audio files and might not work as well for lengthy articles and documents. However, its short-form essay, journal, and email summaries get the point across without the need for complicated configuration or costly subscriptions.
Quillbot handles up to 1,200 words for free and up to 6,000 for only $8.33/month in over 45 languages. These capabilities make it perfect for beginners and an excellent option for students.
3. Notta AI: best for summarizing audio files
| Best for: | Summarizing audio files |
| Starting price: | $4.99/month |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Top features: | Handles a variety of content with ease, includes timestamps, offers convenient editing tools |
Notta Ai is a robust AI tool designed for transcription. It leverages sophisticated automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to work with various audio and video files with precision and consistency.
It easily covers a range of content – from conversational podcasts and interviews to lengthy meetings and videos with technical jargon.
There is room for improvement in terms of managing heavy accents and customizing summary length. But its timestamp and editing features impressed both me and my team. They make referencing the original file and adjusting the transcripts straightforward and fast.
Notta AI offers these types of perks at just $4.99/month, which makes it one of the most affordable options among the best AI text summarizer software solutions we reviewed.
4. Writesonic: best AI PDF summarizer
| Best for: | PDF summarizing |
| Starting price: | $20.00/month |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Top features: | Great long-form text processing, effective ad hook and SEO features, flexible range of pricing plans |
Writesonic is a multi-functional AI tool with impressive PDF summarization abilities. It handles lengthy documents effortlessly, delivering clear, to-the-point summaries. It also makes tailoring output simple thanks to different voice options, compelling hook creation, and SEO tools.
Such features are an excellent match for advertisers seeking an easy, quick, and cost-effective way to craft content that boosts online visibility. Writesonic’s concise summaries make excellent ad copies for social media and e-commerce.
The pricing plans, including a free option, also make budgeting simple. My main issue is the way its features are divided across plans and its somewhat cluttered interface. Compared to other tools, Writesonic is not as beginner-friendly and suitable for those looking for a streamlined experience.
5. ChatGPT: best AI article summarizer
| Best for: | AI article summaries |
| Starting price: | $20/month |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Top features: | Quick and responsive, adaptable to various topics and content requests, backed by up-to-date Google search |
ChatGPT is by far the most well-known AI tool on our list, so it hardly needs an introduction. While it offers a wide range of features, we found it to be the best AI to summarize articles.
The famous tool easily processes long web-sourced texts from various fields, adapting its output to fit different needs and audiences. Thanks to its access to Google search, it also easily fills in the gaps, adding relevant information or refining the language.
Its biggest weakness, however, lies in formats beyond plain text. Without access to web data, ChatGPT may struggle with audio or video as well as less common text files. Some users complain about its tendency to produce summaries that are generic, repetitive, or lacking in substance.
6. HubSpot: best for meeting summaries
| Best for: | Meeting summarizing |
| Starting price: | Free |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Top features: | Live meeting recording, transcription, and summarization, easy integration capabilities, free to use |
HubSpot is another AI tool with a range of functions. Yet, I’ve chosen it primarily for its Fathom AI Notetaker. It’s a HubSpot-certified app that can record, transcribe, and summarize your online meetings in real time, whether they’re in audio or video form.
It syncs flawlessly with multiple popular meeting and communication platforms. Whether your company uses Microsoft Teams or Google Meet or communicates through Slack or Zapier, HubSpot’s summarizer will capture all the key moments and help you share them with your colleagues.
Still, a few limitations hold it back. The app can’t handle standalone audio or video files, so it’s ineffective for in-person meetings. It also lacks templates, which would give you a little more control over your summaries’ structure.
7. ClickUp: best for productivity optimization
| Best for: | Productivity optimization |
| Starting price: | $7/month (per user) |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Top features: | Instant task, report, and document synopses, auto-generating summarizer capabilities, real-time summary notifications |
ClickUp AI is just one feature of the namesake project management tool made for work optimization.
True to its name, the tool offers task, report, note, and document summaries with a click of a button. Now, its output can feel robotic and generic, with little leeway for refining, so it’s not best for creative fields. However, it delivers clear and concise updates.
The Cybernews team and I particularly liked its auto-summary capabilities. You can use it to set up summary blocks in shared documents across multiple languages. It can also send automatic notifications with comment and message thread summaries straight to your phone. It’s an easy way to keep your team coordinated no matter where they are working.
8. Scribbr: best for simplicity and ease of use
| Best for: | Simplicity and ease of use |
| Starting price: | Free |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Top features: | Minimalistic design, solid complex language command, fully mobile and desktop compatible and free |
Scribbr is an AI platform built for scholars and researchers. It offers tools like proofreading, plagiarism checking, and a simple yet effective text summarizer.
Its design is clean and intuitive, comparable to Quillbot’s. Open it, and you’ll find two empty fields – input and output – along with a length slider and two output formats – paragraph or bullet points. This makes it the easiest AI document summarizer to use on this list.
However, its simplicity comes with some drawbacks. You can’t summarize more than 600 words at once, forcing you to split long content into sections. It also offers only auto-generated keyword customization, so you won’t be able to refine your summaries with prompts.
9. Eightify: best for YouTube video summaries
| Best for: | YouTube video summaries |
| Starting price: | $9.99/month |
| Free version: | No (only a 7-day free trial) |
| Top features: | Time-stamped video-to-text transcription, easy-to-share key insights, comprehensive top-comment overviews |
Eightify is an AI tool built specifically for YouTube content. While its niche focus limits its use elsewhere (not even other video platforms), you’re bound to find its versatility impressive within its domain.
The software doesn’t only transcribe and condense content available on YouTube. It can interpret video files in more than 40 languages and across a range of topics while organizing this information in multiple ways. For instance, it gathers key insights, adds timestamps according to tackled topics, and breaks down other viewers' feedback on the video.
Eightify also lets you share your summaries with your friends or co-workers through easily accessible links. It also works seamlessly on mobile devices through its standalone apps. I only wish it wasn’t as dependent on internet connectivity – it’s not the best fit for low-bandwidth areas.
10. Scholarcy: best for students and researchers
| Best for: | Students and researches |
| Starting price: | $4.99/month |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Top features: | Diverse academic content coverage, learning style and needs-geared output, versatile export options |
Much like Scribbr, Scholarcy is an AI summarizer designed to assist learning. Yet, I found it to be much more popular among students and researchers because of its robust set of features.
It quickly scans and summarizes research papers, reports, and even book chapters. The output adapts to your reading style – you can get highlighted key terms for reference, bulleted lists for quick skimming, or flashcards for easier memorization.
Scholarcy also allows you to adjust the language to your student level and export its output to various platforms. But it has trouble with multimedia-heavy text and doesn’t always import smoothly. Plus, its best features are locked behind its pro plan.
Best summary generator tools compared
To give you a neat overview of all the best AI summarizers, I’ve compiled them in a table, along with their key metrics. Take your time to compare their features and fees and choose the option ideal for your needs.
| AI summarizer | Best for | Starting price | Free version | Unique features |
| Jasper AI | Customized output | $49/month | No (only a 7-day free trial) | Brand style, voice, and audience-tailored content, 30-language support, multi-format compatibility |
| Quillbot | Short-term summaries | $8.33/month | Yes | User-friendly interface, adjustable paragraph and key-point summaries, free 1,200-word coverage |
| Notta AI | Audio and video file summaries | $4.99/month | Yes | Handles a variety of content with ease, includes timestamps, offers convenient editing tools |
| Writesonic | PDF summaries | $20/month | Yes | Great long-form text processing, effective ad hook and SEO features, flexible range of pricing plans |
| ChatGPT | Article summaries | $20/month | Yes | Quick and responsive, adaptable to various topics and content requests, backed by up-to-date Google search |
| HubSpot | Meeting summarizes | Free | Yes | Live meeting recording, transcription, and summarization, easy integration capabilities, free to use |
| ClickUp | Productivity optimization | $7/month (per user) | Yes | Instant task, report, and document synopses, auto-generating summarizer capabilities, real-time summary notifications |
| Scribbr | Simplicity and ease of use | Free | Yes | Minimalistic design, solid complex language command, fully mobile and desktop compatible and free |
| Eightify | YouTube video summaries | $9.99/month | No (only a 7-day free trial) | Time-stamped video-to-text transcription, easy-to-share key insights, comprehensive top-comment overviews |
| Scholarcy | Students and researches | $4.99/month | Yes | Diverse academic content coverage, learning style and needs-geared output, versatile export options |
Our methodology for testing AI summarizers
I based the best AI summarizer list at the top of this page on in-depth research and analysis. Instead of focusing on firsthand tests, my team and I took feedback from professional and casual users across multiple industries into account. We then reviewed these insights with our own evaluation criteria, which you can learn about below.
- User experience (25%): The Cybernews tech experts and I ensure that each AI summarize tool we recommend is user-friendly. We consider its design and layout, the accessibility of its features, its processing time, and its output quality. Our goal is to find tools that are simple to use and fast at delivering reliable results.
- Pricing (25%): Rather than simply choosing the lowest-priced AI summarizers, we aim for the best value. Our team weighs each tool’s performance against its cost and analyzes how it stacks up against competitors. These steps help us accurately identify the smartest investments.
- Features (35%): Cybernews experts and I spend most of our research evaluating AI summarizer features. We look at their core and advanced functionalities, test their performance, and see how well they support edits and customization.
- Support (15%): Our research wraps up with a customer service and onboarding resources check. It allows us to filter out brands with slow response times, ineffective support agents, or limited instructional materials.
What is an AI summarizer and how does it work?
An AI summarizer is exactly what its name suggests — a software-based tool that compress long-form content into a comprehensive yet concise summary with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
Depending on its capabilities, it can process written text such as articles, essays, and emails or multimedia files such as YouTube videos and meeting recordings. It may also produce summaries in different formats, including paragraphs, bullet points, transcriptions, and reports. These features typically vary from one brand to another.
Regardless, you’ll find that all AI summarizers are built on the same core technologies – machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). These tools collect large amounts of data to learn how human language works, helping them understand meaning, structure, and context. They use this knowledge to interpret input and produce accurate summaries.
This functionality has made AI summarizers invaluable across multiple fields, including education, business, and content creation. For instance, students can use AI that summarize articles and scientific research to learn, entrepreneurs to extract key takeaways from meetings, and content creators to craft clear, digestible content.
Pros and cons of AI summarizers
Like all tech, summarizer AI tools come with advantages and disadvantages. A closer look at both will help you decide if they’re a good fit for your work or study routine.
How to use an AI summarizer: 5 easy steps
Using AI summary software is as simple as can be. You shouldn’t run into any trouble, however tech-savvy you are. But if you need a little extra help, my step-by-step guide has got you covered. Follow my lead, and you'll have it figured out in no time.
-
Choose an AI summarizer brand: Check out our reviews and pick the right AI summarizer for your needs. Open it, find the Content Summarizer tool through the search engine, and select it.
-
Upload the text: Copy and paste the content you want to summarize into the empty box. Make sure it doesn’t go over the 5,000-word limit by checking the word count under the box.
-
Specify your needs: Adjust your summary format by choosing between suggested prompts or entering an original one. Pick your target audience and add additional instructions if necessary.
-
Generate your summary: Hit the Generate Summary button to submit your request. Then, skim the output to ensure the tool captured the main points while staying true to the format and audience voice you chose.
Final word on the best AI summarizers
AI summarizers are advanced tools built to make your work easier. Powered by machine learning and NLP, they can process and condense different content formats. Use them, and you can get a short study guide, bulleted meeting recap, or concise video transcription in seconds – customized to your preferred tone, voice, and style.
The trick is choosing the right tool for your needs. My in-depth research has narrowed down the best AI summarizer software, making that choice simple. For highly customized output, Jasper AI is a perfect pick. If you’re after quick bullet-point summaries, Writesonic is a great option. And for top-tier multimedia transcriptions, Notta AI is hard to beat.
Read our reviews, consider each tool’s features, pricing, and pros and cons, and go for the most appealing one. Say goodbye to hours of reading – streamline your work with little effort.
FAQ
How good are AI summarizers?
AI summarizers can be really good, depending on the brand you use and the needs you have. If customization is important to you, Jasper AI is your best bet. For top-tier transcription, Notta AI stands out. And if you want a simple, no-fuss gist generator, Quillbot is the way to go.
Can AI summarize a PDF?
Yes, many AI tools can summarize PDF documents well. The best one we’ve discovered is Writesonic because of its effortless handling of lengthy texts, multiple voice options, great hook and SEO features, and a variety of pricing plans.
Are there limitations to AI summarizing tools?
Yes, limitations of modern AI summarizing tools usually stem from context analysis. Even top-tier software can falter when faced with ambiguity, emotional undertones, or varying interpretations. They also often overlook cultural subtleties and obscure references, leading to generic or oversimplified output.
Is there an AI that summarizes text for free?
Yes, many AI tools will summarize text for free. All our top-rated picks (except Jasper AI and Eightify) have free plans that offer this service. They may limit the number of words you can summarize or offer fewer features, but they still get the job done.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are markedmarked