15 Best Free Online PDF Summarizer Tools 2022

Reading through a document with lots of pages can be time-consuming and tedious – so is skimming.

You want to get quick facts and information about an article, news story, a book, or other information so you can decide what to do next.

A summary gives you a concise overview of the main points in the text you’re reading and is much shorter than the original text.

Maybe you’re required to show that you’ve understood a standalone assignment or you want to make notes that will help you remember what you’ve read. In such cases, you need a summary to get a clear understanding of the original source before paraphrasing or quoting it.

You can take the longer route of reading the entire document or material and creating your own side notes about what you’ve read. Or you can use a summarizer tool to do it for you.

In this post, we’ll look at 15 of the best free online PDF summarizer tools you can use for this purpose. Let’s dive in.

Best Free Online PDF Summarizer Tools

1. Skimcast

Skimcast is an online tool that generates summaries for any document while maintaining the original text in the PDF. The tool highlights the important information from the text you’re required to read and gives you the gist of it.

You can read through or between the highlights to glean different bits and pieces of information as you go along. You can’t copy-paste text blocks though, but you can upload a PDF to summarize the document and select a percentage of the original copy to skim the summary.

Plus, if you have a multiple-page PDF document, Skimcast lets you specify the page or pages you want to be summarized.

It also comes with a Chrome extension so you can get document summaries between 1-99 percent of the original length of your PDF document – but you can decide the length too.

The tool automatically lists the key themes in every PDF document. Once you click on a theme, it will be highlighted wherever it appears in your PDF.

You can also use the extension when skimming online documents or course material that may be locked behind subscriber paywalls.

2. IntelliPPT

IntelliPPT is an online summarizer tool that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver text summaries that are accurate. You can upload your PDF document or add in a few paragraphs or Word documents.

Once you upload the text, you can increase or decrease the summary size to any length you want. Just hit the summarize button and you’ll get an automatically generated PPT that you can copy and use wherever you want.

The summary process will give you precise results thanks to the use of AI, which makes your job easier by converting documents to PPTs. This way you don’t have to read the entire file yourself.

The process is quick and simple, and you can input text of up to 3000 characters on the free version with a 1MB file size limit.

3. Flacked AI

Flacked AI is an all-in-one AI-powered platform that you can use to summarize your copy among other needs like copywriting and email writing.

The tool succinctly summarizes your content by digesting any document or text and delivers a beautifully written summary with as much information as possible on the subject.

You can summarize any document, webpage, text, or image in seconds. Whether you want to write more or do better copy faster, you can use Flacked AI as your go-to summarizer tool.

The tool is used by founders, content creators, creative agencies, marketing teams, media agencies, and product managers among other users to get quick summaries and make decisions faster.

4. Summarizer.org

This summarizer tool also uses AI to generate summaries of your PDF files within seconds. The tool finds the important and best lines of your text and eliminates the time-consuming and tedious process of having to read and summarize long documents or portions of text.

You can save time, make PDF files easier to read, and it’s free so you don’t have to pay anything. You can focus more on what matters and make sure people understand the key takeaways from the material you share.

Once you open the platform, you can upload a PDF document and the tool will extract the most relevant information from the text in your file. It will then create a summary that includes only the necessary points in less than five minutes.

You’ll get a condensed, short, and concise summary that you can use or share online for higher engagement. You can also set summarization length, customize your content to show bullets and best lines, and get the core meaning you want to convey through the summary based on the PDF you upload.

The summarized content won’t save in the system so no third party can use it.

You can also use the Summarizer.org Chrome extension, which focuses on making your content brief while keeping its wit intact. You’ll get the same features as the online tool for free and use it on any electronic device including your computer and mobile device.

5. Scholarcy

Scholarcy is another free online summarizer tool that scans your content and reads it within seconds. It then breaks it up so you can easily access and assess your file.

The unique Robo-Highlighter feature highlights important contributions and phrases automatically, so you don’t have to print a paper and go over it with a marker pen to highlight what you need.

Plus, the tool creates a referenced summary that summarizes the entire paper rewriting statements in the third person so it’s easier to cite the information correctly in your PDF file.

You can customize the summarization process by choosing the number of words, and highlighting and language variation levels.

Scholarcy will find the references in the PDF document and you can download them in a .RIS format or BibTex so you can import each entry into your reference manager.

You can also extract tables and figures in your PDF document and download them in Excel format to run calculations on the results.

Plus, you can configure Scholarcy to give you thumbnails of each figure in your document and jump to the corresponding numbers as you read through.

The tool is used by different people including professionals, students, or researchers to get points of their PDF documents quickly and get summaries they can revert to any time.

You can speed-read content, follow arguments, and even use the browser extension for free to get your file summarized while it’s open.

6. QuillBot

QuillBot is known for its paraphrasing features, but it’s also an online summarizer tool you can use for your PDF documents. You can take any text-based content and, in one click, you can get the important bits of the information.

The summarizer condenses documents, papers, articles, and other information to the main points using AI’s natural language processing to find the necessary information and keep the original meaning.

You can summarize key sentences or paragraph mode. This way, you’ll get bullet-point lists of the important phrases or sentences, and unique paragraphs that summarize the content.

You can also manage the length of your summary whether it’s a news article, confusing paragraph, or research paper. You can also get the information you’re looking for from the summary.

Through AI-based algorithms, you can choose the important parts you want and check that the summary matches the original context.

Check out the best alternatives tools to QuillBot.

7. Paper Digest

Paper Digest is a summarizer tool that’s powered by AI and enables communicators, students, or researchers, and other users to summarize their documents and cut down reading time.

The tool generates an automatic summary of a given research paper or your PDF file, which you’ll upload, and the tool will deliver a bulleted summary of the paper.

The software understands your content and then fetches, parses, and summarizes your document. However, it must be in Open Access and is compatible with Wiley, Springer, and other publishers.

The summarization service is fast and saves you the time you’d otherwise have spent reading the entire document. Paper Digest summarizes what your paper is about and what you can learn from it by determining important sentences from the full text and then listing them out in a single-page summary.

The overall goal is to give you the central concepts in your document so you can decide whether to read the whole document.

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8. Text Compactor

Text Compactor is a free online summarizer software that lets you summarize any part of your PDF document and set how much of the text you want to keep in the summarized version.

If you’re not happy with the result, you can change the percentage and try again.

The site doesn’t bog you down with adverts like other sites, and you don’t need to register to use it. You get a feature that translates languages and a slider to adjust the percentage of the copied content you want to keep in summary.

Text Compactor also delivers longer and more complex sentences but you can use it for your shorter PDF files instead and get summaries based on the most important sentences.

Interesting Post: QuillBot vs Grammarly

9. SummarizeBot

SummarizeBot helps you save time and focus on what’s more important by summarizing your documents accurately. This way, it’s easier for you to digest big sections of text in compressed formats.

You can analyze the most important, interesting, and relevant information and know more because you’ll read less in the shortest time possible.

The chatbot analyzes your document – but you can also use web links or multimedia files – and extracts the main ideas into a brief, concise summary.

You can also structure unstructured data and get a better version of the text in your summary. The tool delivers the best summaries using native technologies and compresses the text so you can save the time you’d have taken doing research.

Whether it’s a PDF, mp3, DOC, TXT, JPG, or other types of files, you can use the SummarizeBot to deliver well-summarized content in many different languages.

10. SMMRY

SMMRY is an online PDF document summarizer that’s created to condense text and articles into accurate summaries. The main goal is to give you an efficient understanding of the text, which is done by giving you the sentences you need.

It does all this through its core algorithm, which ranks sentences by importance, reorganizes the summary to focus on keyword selection or topics, removes any transition phrase, unnecessary clauses, and excessive examples.

SMMRY gives you what you need to get the perfect summary as it provides a design that’s easy-to-use, has a wide range of features, and also has advanced settings. The web-based tool also summarizes any text you add into it or add from a PDF file or URL.

The tool also comes with a heat map that uses color to group sentences by importance, and you can ignore the questions, exclamations, or quotations.

The core algorithm summarizes the content by associating words with their grammatical counterparts, calculating how each word occurs in the text, and assigning points based on word popularity.

Next, it detects the periods that represent the end of a sentence, splits the text into individual sentences, ranks them by the sum of their words’ points, and then returns the most highly ranked sentences chronologically.

Also Read: Best Free Punctuation Checker Apps

11. Tools4noobs

Tools4noobs is a website that brings together useful widgets and scripts that anyone can use or add to their own sites. The free software allows you to summarize your articles by adding a URL or pasting the text onto the online platform.

You can summarize your PDF document by adding a URL to the document and you’ll get several intricate options that allow you to specify the summary you want.

You can pick a threshold from 1-100, and trim the summary based on the words the software finds or you can adjust how many lines you want it to show.

Alternatively, you can get the software to highlight sentences by their keywords and relevance, and enlarge the most common words in the document.

12. Helppr

Helppr is an online browser extension that quickly generates summaries of any document you upload so you can decide if it’s worth using or not.

The software understands your documents with clarity making it easy for you to consume information thanks to its AI-powered, personalized software Chrome extension.

You can consume information more efficiently thanks to its advanced AI summaries, which the software generates on the fly for verbose content.

Plus, it extracts relevant keywords and data from your PDF file so you won’t waste time on unnecessary content.

Helppr also explains relevant terms or definitions for keywords and concepts as you browse in the same tab so you don’t have to switch tabs or look up the word.

It also simplifies complex sentences and decodes jargon making it easier for you to read and understand. Inbuilt translation removes language barriers and you get audios of the files you read, in just a few clicks. You can listen anywhere you want and even learn to pronounce words or sentences.

Helppr also lets you set your own summary length: short, medium, or long – and you can adjust the text size too for easier reading.

Also Read: Best Website Spell Checkers

13. ExplainToMe

ExplainToMe is an online summarizer tool that allows you to add your content and it will generate a summary in no time. The chrome-based extension offers quick access to its summarizing features plus a TextRank system that processes your content and summarizes the text easily.

The automatic summarizer’s graph-based algorithm scans through your content and extracts a concise summary, similar to what search engines do when they return relevant web pages from your search query.

The feature works on the idea of semantics and you can then know the relationship between phrases and words. It helps you decide what’s important and which sentence has more weight in the summary section.

14. TLDR This

This is a free web-based online summarizer tool that also provides a Chrome extension so you can summarize your content or text. You can save so much time in reading long documents and get short bullet points from the content to make it easier for you to read.

TLDR This summarizes any document or article into easy-to-digest and concise content giving you time to focus on what’s important and free yourself from overwhelming information.

You can place a URL link of the document or paste the text in the box provided to start summarizing your content. You can also select the option whether to summarize using the basic type or advanced one and display keywords.

The tool automatically summarizes your document in one click without taking the painfully long time that you would to read the document manually. It then summarizes your text into five key bullet points using natural language processing (NLP).

It’s a simple yet handy tool that will help you spend less time reading counterproductive information and more doing work that’s valuable to you.

To start, just click the TL;DR button in the toolbar (on a Chrome browser) that you want to summarize, and the tool will generate a summary of fewer than five sentences right there.

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15. Summarizing Tool

Summarizing Tool is powered by AI and sums up long portions of text into shorter ones. You can get summaries of your text with key sentences that are an overview of the general copy.

You can upload your PDF document and the tool will convert paragraphs into one paragraph in one click.

Whether it’s for academic or educational use, the summarizing tool is accurate and efficient to make summaries of your document. The tool is built with advanced algorithms that work to understand your content and generates a summary without changing the meaning of the actual content to give you the best overview.

You can set the summarization percentage, and the tool will display everything in the format you want. This helps when you have a presentation you want converted into a quick bulleted overview for preparation purposes.

The tool also shows the ranking of your content and generates a sequence from the highly scored sentence in the top position. You can also see the best sentence with the highest score based on the tool’s algorithm and get the top sentences to use in your summary.

Once the summarizing tool understands your content, it picks the most appropriate sentences and scores them based on word selection, optimization, accuracy, and structure. It will then understand the importance of the sentences and gather them to make a summary that you can use.

Plus, it proofreads the summary automatically and picks up any errors, which you can remove on your own. The tool is widely used by students, writers, editors, press release writers, journalists, and other professionals.

Wrapping Up

Whether you’re working on a thesis, article, report, or presentation for work or leisure, an online PDF summarizer tool is good to have.

You can get a quick and refined summary that contains the important bits of the document to share with others and create more engagement or whet their appetite to want to read it.

Any of these 15 free online PDF summarizer tools can help you start your journey to summarizing long documents, save time, and eliminate the manual hassle of having to read through long documents.