AI Summarize
Generate intelligent AI-powered PDF summaries.
or click to browse — supports PDF files up to 25MB
Processed successfully. Download below.
How to use
- 1 Drop or click to upload your file
- 2 Adjust options if shown
- 3 Click AI Summarize
- 4 Download your result instantly
- ✓ Files up to 1 GB
- ✓ Unlimited jobs/hour
- ✓ Batch processing (up to 100 files)
- ✓ Priority support
Files are processed securely and deleted within 1 hour. Files are processed automatically. No human reviews your documents, and PDFRun does not use them to train models.
Why this works
Drop in a PDF and get back a written summary in seconds — brief bullet points, a standard paragraph, or a detailed multi-section overview. Useful for long reports, contracts, research papers, and anything you don’t have time to read in full.
Long PDFs are everywhere and most don’t deserve a full read. A 60-page quarterly report might need a 4-bullet summary for a meeting prep; a 30-page contract might need a single paragraph identifying unusual clauses; a research paper might need a detailed section-by-section overview if you’re deciding whether to read it fully.
AI Summarize extracts the text from your PDF (running OCR first if the PDF is scanned) and passes it to a language model that produces a written summary at the length you specified. Three length options cover most use cases.
Brief (3–5 points) is the right pick for meeting prep — you want the headline takeaways in under a minute of reading. Output is a bullet list of the document’s most important claims, decisions, or findings.
Standard paragraph is the right pick for daily triage — you want enough context to decide whether to read the full document. Output is one or two paragraphs covering the document’s purpose, main points, and conclusion.
Detailed is the right pick when you’ll cite the summary in your own writing or need to make a decision based on it. Output is structured by section, walks through the document’s argument or content, and is roughly 600–1000 words. It’s still much faster than reading the original but doesn’t skip nuance.
The summary returns as a .md (Markdown) file. Markdown opens cleanly in any text editor, can be copy-pasted into email or Slack with formatting preserved, and converts trivially to Word or PDF if you need it in those formats (using our Markdown-to-PDF tool, for instance).
A few things to know. The summariser doesn’t make up facts — it summarises only what’s in the document. It can’t answer questions the document doesn’t address. For very long PDFs (over ~80 pages) the summary may smooth over distinctions between sections; consider using Extract Pages to break long documents into thematic chunks and summarising each separately.
For sensitive documents (contracts under negotiation, personal medical records, etc.), be aware that AI summarisation involves sending the text content to a language model service. PDFRun routes the content through our infrastructure under the same one-hour deletion policy as every other tool, but the text is processed by a third-party AI service. If your document is highly sensitive, consider whether AI summarisation is the right tool versus reading the document directly.
How it works
-
1Upload your PDFDrop the PDF into the upload box. Born-digital and scanned PDFs both work — we OCR scans automatically before summarising.
-
2Pick the summary lengthBrief (3–5 points for meeting prep), Standard paragraph (daily triage), or Detailed (citation-quality, ~600–1000 words).
-
3Run the summaryPress Summarize. Processing typically takes 10–30 seconds depending on document length and chosen detail level.
-
4Download the .mdThe summary returns as a Markdown file you can open in any text editor, paste into Slack or email, or convert to PDF.
Real-world uses
Executives
Meeting prep: a 60-page quarterly report becomes a 4-bullet brief in 20 seconds.
Lawyers
Triage of long contracts — spot unusual clauses in a Standard paragraph before deciding whether full review is needed.
Researchers
Decide whether a 30-page paper is worth reading in full based on a Detailed section-by-section summary.
Investors
Filter through a stack of pitch decks or earnings reports quickly to find the ones worth a full read.
Common questions
How accurate is the summary?
For straightforward documents (reports, articles, contracts), summaries are typically reliable — the model is instructed to stay grounded in the source text rather than introduce outside information. For nuanced or argumentative documents, the Detailed setting captures more of the original’s subtlety than Brief. Like any language model it can still misread or omit something, so always verify important figures, dates and quotes against the original document before relying on them.
What format is the output?
Markdown (.md). It opens in any text editor, copies cleanly into Slack and email with formatting preserved, and converts trivially to Word or PDF using our Markdown-to-PDF tool.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
Yes. Scanned PDFs run through OCR first to extract the text, then the summary runs on that extracted text. Accuracy on the summary tracks accuracy of the OCR; clean modern scans produce summaries indistinguishable in quality from born-digital sources.
How long can the source PDF be?
Practically: 80–100 pages produces the best summaries. Longer documents are summarised but may smooth over distinctions between sections — consider breaking very long PDFs into thematic chunks using Extract Pages and summarising each separately.
Is my document private?
The PDF travels over HTTPS to our servers and is deleted within 1 hour. The extracted text is processed by a third-party AI service to generate the summary. If your document is highly sensitive, weigh whether AI summarisation is appropriate versus reading the document directly.
Can I ask follow-up questions about the document?
Not in this tool — AI Summarize produces a single written summary, not an interactive chat. For document Q&A, the summary often answers the most common questions; for deeper exploration, search the source PDF directly (Cmd-F after OCR if it was a scan).