The HN Solutions Text Summarizer condenses articles, reports, emails and study notes into faithful key points — as one line, bullets, a paragraph or a detailed brief. It captures what the text actually says, with no invented opinions. Free and instant.
How to use the text summarizer
- Paste the long text — articles, meeting notes, research, anything up to ~2,000 words.
- Pick a style: bullets for skimming, one line for TL;DRs, detailed for study notes.
- Click Summarize and copy the result.
Frequently asked questions
Is the summary accurate?
The tool is instructed to stay faithful to the source with no added opinions. For critical decisions, skim the original too — no summary replaces the source.
Can it summarize study notes for exams?
Yes — the detailed mode is built for revision: it keeps definitions and key facts rather than flattening them away.
What is the length limit?
About 2,000 words per run. For longer documents, summarize section by section and combine.
Is it free?
Yes, with a fair-use cap of 15 runs per hour.
Rewrite any awkward lines with the paraphrasing tool, and if you are summarizing for a blog post, finish with the title generator and meta tag generator.
Extractive and abstractive summaries are not the same thing
Extractive summarising picks the most important sentences out of the original and stitches them together. Nothing is invented, because every word came from your text. The trade-off is that it can read choppily, since sentences written to follow each other are now adjacent to different neighbours.
Abstractive summarising rewrites the ideas in new words, the way a person would. It reads better and it carries a real risk: a model rewriting your meaning can subtly change it. Always read an abstractive summary against the original before you use it anywhere that matters.
What length should a summary be?
Roughly 10–20% of the original is the range where a summary is still useful. Shorter than that and you are writing a headline, not a summary. Longer and the reader may as well read the original.
For a 2,000-word article that means 200–400 words. For a 500-word email, 50–100. If you need one line, ask for one line explicitly — that is a different job with a different result.
Text that summarises badly
Some material resists it, and it is worth knowing before you blame the tool:
- Dialogue and interviews — meaning lives in the back-and-forth, and flattening it loses who said what.
- Step-by-step instructions — every step matters, so a summary is either the full list or useless.
- Anything already dense — a well-edited abstract has no slack left to remove.
- Numbers and figures — check every one that survives into the summary. This is where errors hide.
Using a summary as a starting point, not an output
The strongest use is not publishing the summary. It is using it to see the shape of something — deciding whether a report is worth reading in full, pulling the key claims out of a source before you write about it, or checking whether your own draft actually says what you think it says.
That last one is genuinely useful: summarise your own article, and if the summary misses your main point, your structure is burying it. The word counter tells you how long a piece is; a summary tells you what it is actually about.
Where your text goes
This tool sends your text to an AI provider to produce the summary. Nothing is stored here, but the text does leave your device — so keep confidential material out of it. If you need something that never transmits anything, the browser-only tools on this site are listed on the tools page.