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by alex_h 1939 days ago
Can it turn a well written email into a short list of facts? That seems more useful.
4 comments

There was a pretty good sci-fi story in (IIRC) Omni, wherein someone figures out how to make a computer that can scan in a document and produce a clear, simple summary.

The main character is a friend of the inventor, who can't seem to make any sales. Later, they run into each other again, and the inventor is HUGELY rich.

Turns out he realized that the original idea was a flop, reversed the process, and sold it to law firms.

I think that'd be a much harder thing to do well. You'll have a lot of false negatives. Missing nuances in complex sentences can change the meaning significantly whereas when adding extra words to a list of facts as long the words are pretty neutral meaning-wise you'll be fine.
Haha, text summarisation has been a traditional NLP task for ages. Google Scholar has 16,000 results just from the last year.

More leads: https://paperswithcode.com/task/text-summarization

It looks like Axios is launching something like this. I asked and they want 6 digits a month - way to much for us so I haven't demo-ed so maybe it's not AI but more simple suggestions

https://www.axioshq.com/

I think that's something along the lines of this. (I don't know much about it, just listened to the podcast.)

https://hanselminutes.com/763/tldr-extreme-summarization-as-...