Most summarizers give you a shorter version of the words. What you usually need is different: what this says, in order, and what it wants from you.
Paste the text or hand it a PDF. You get a few sentences of overview, the key points in the order they appear, and a separate list of anything you are being asked to do.
Free summarizer
Summarize anything long
An article, a report, a transcript, a PDF. You get a short overview, the key points in order, and anything you are being asked to do. No sign-up, no word limit worth worrying about.
The longer runs cost us money to answer, so this is the trade: your email address, and the HOW TO // AI newsletter once a week. Unsubscribe any time.
Free, no sign-up. We keep nothing you paste in: it goes to the model and comes straight back to you.
How much text it takes
Around 30,000 characters in one go, which is roughly 5,000 words or 40 pages — a long report, a full transcript, a chapter. There is no account, no trial and no three-paragraph cap waiting behind a paywall.
For anything longer, summarize it in parts. Genuinely long documents summarize better that way regardless of the tool: one pass per section keeps the detail that a single pass over 200 pages throws away.
Summarizing a PDF
Choose the file and the text is extracted in your browser. The PDF itself is never uploaded anywhere — only the text it contains is sent to be summarized, and nothing is kept afterwards.
Scanned PDFs are the exception. If the pages are images of text rather than text, there is nothing to extract and the tool will say so.
Transcripts, meetings and videos
Transcripts are what this is best at, because they are long, repetitive and mostly filler. A one-hour meeting is around 9,000 words and summarizes to a page.
For a video, open the transcript and paste it in: on YouTube, the three dots under the video have a “Show transcript” option, and most meeting apps will export one. Pick “My manager, who wants the decision” if you are forwarding the result to someone who was not there.
What it will not do
It will not add conclusions the text did not reach, change the numbers, or tell you what it thinks. Names, figures and dates come through exactly as written. If the text you pasted is cut off mid-sentence, the summary says so rather than quietly inventing an ending.
Everything here is free and unmetered in any way that matters. If you want the same thing inside a chat where you can ask follow-up questions, our comparison of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini covers which one handles long documents best, and the tool chooser will pick one for you.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a word limit?
About 30,000 characters per go, roughly 5,000 words or 40 pages, with no account and nothing held back behind an upgrade. Longer documents are better summarized a section at a time anyway.
Can it summarize a YouTube video?
Not from the link. Open the transcript under the video — the three dots have a "Show transcript" option — and paste that in. It handles transcripts well, since they are long and mostly filler.
Do you store what I paste?
No. The text goes to the model and the summary comes back. Nothing is written down at our end, and PDFs are read in your browser rather than uploaded.
How accurate is it?
It is told to keep names, numbers and dates exactly as written and never to add conclusions of its own. It is still worth checking any figure you are going to repeat, as you would with a colleague's summary.