20
Lesson 20 · 1 min
Summarise anything
AI can turn a 40-page report into one page in seconds, if you tell it what you need the summary for.
Most assistants accept long text, PDFs, web pages, even video transcripts. Summaries are one of the most reliable things AI does.
A plain "summarise this" gives a generic result. Say who it is for and why: "Summarise for a busy manager who must decide whether to renew this contract." The AI then keeps what matters for that decision.
Ask for a structure: three key points, risks, numbers, and open questions. That makes summaries easy to scan and compare.
Summaries can still miss or twist details. For decisions, ask it to quote the exact sentence it relied on, so you can check quickly.
Do it now
Summarise a real document
- 1.Pick a long article, report or policy you have not read yet.
- 2.Upload it or paste it with the prompt below.
- 3.Check one quoted sentence against the original.
Summarise this for [WHO], who needs to [DECISION OR GOAL]. Give: 3 key points, any numbers that matter, risks, and open questions. For each key point, quote the sentence from the text it comes from. [PASTE OR ATTACH]
Words from this lesson
- Context window
- The maximum amount of text an AI can look at in one go. Anything beyond it is forgotten for that conversation.
- Multimodal
- Able to work with more than one kind of input or output, such as text, images, sound and video together.
- Hallucination
- When an AI states something false with confidence, such as a made-up fact, quote or source.