How to use the “Summarize” feature to shorten long texts in macOS

As an internet writer, I am a staunch critic of what they call twitterization In other words, the phenomenon in which people get used to receiving their content in 140 (good, 280) characters and reject any type of more complex formulation, creating a massification of simplistic thinking. Don't be that person!

Overcoming my moment #militei, I can not deny that, in some moments of life, we need some service that gives a brief summary in a text or another for us is for absolute lack of time to understand that subject that falls on the test of tomorrow, be it too lazy to read 50 pages by a slightly repetitive author anyway, the reasons are many. My point: did you know that macOS has a native feature that does this for you?

If the answer to the question above was “no”, absolutely understandable: the resource "Sum up", for some reason, it is disabled by default and is buried in a very obscure system menu. Still, it is a very useful feature at times and that can help you save a few precious minutes of life.

Let's see how to activate it, then:

  1. Open System Preferences;
  2. Click on the “Keyboard” option;
  3. Go to the "Shortcuts" tab and select "Services" in the side window;

    Resource

  4. In the main window, within "Text", activate the option "Summarize";
  5. If you want to assign a keyboard shortcut to the resource, click on the “Summarize” option and then on “Add shortcut”;
  6. Press the shortcut you want to assign (for example, R).

Ready! Now the feature is activated and you can recall it by selecting the text you want to shorten (shortcut A works well for this) and by typing the previously configured shortcut or, alternatively, by right clicking on the text and selecting Services Summarize.

When you do this, a window will open with the selected text; by dragging the “Summary size” bar, you adjust how short you want your text to stay. Apple uses textual recognition techniques to suppress less important phrases and leave only the main idea of ​​the content. It is possible to choose whether the abstract will be based on the paragraphs of the text or on its sentences.

Resource

Of course, in the case of an automatic tool, it may not be 100% accurate at all times in some of my tests, the text summaries just went blank. Nothing, of course, that detracts from its usefulness, after all, you can simply drag the size bar a little bit more to the right so that the feature “enlarges” the text a little and returns the meaning to it.

Did you like the tip? Use with or without moderation. 😉

tip from Daniel Infante Junior