Meet your wingman: AI summarization

In the two years since OpenAI hit the scene with its large language model ChatGPT, we’ve seen a Cambrian explosion of AI use cases – customer support, translation, medical diagnosis, LinkedIn posts.

Here at Lumin, we’ve thought carefully about how to approach this silicon explosion.

AI can be a fantastic catalyst for innovation, but in that initial wave of use we saw plenty of privacy errors and hallucinations crop up alongside success cases.

While Lumin has used AI in the background for some time, we’ve taken longer to create customer-facing AI tools because we wanted to get them right. We believe AI and humans should be collaborators; it should supplement your work helpfully, not hallucinate an entire project for you.

We see AI as a wingman. You trust your wingman to navigate when you get bogged down, and rely on it to identify targets beyond your field of vision. But you remain in charge.

Introducing: AI summarization in PDFs

With that in mind, we’ve just released our latest tool into the Lumin editor: AI summarization. No more reading PDFs over and over looking for relevant points. AI can do it for you.

Our “Summarize” tool sifts through documents and pulls out the important parts, so you can get what you need quickly. It’s the perfect wingman for long documents.

Why summarize PDFs?

PDFs are a common file type in admin-heavy industries like law, education and business management; and all our tools are designed to make admin easy, so providing a wingman to help out with heavy reading was a natural step forward.

There’s an endless flow of documents that need summarizing, but a few you can start with include:

• annual reports
• research paper results and conclusions
• study notes

You call the shots when it comes to navigating your documents. But your wingman is here to show you a shortcut.

What does the AI summarizer do?

Our PDF summarizer uses AI to scan your document’s text and pull from it to provide a brief overview of the document.

It works on documents that come under all these limits:

• under 20MB
• under 15 pages
• under 48,000 characters

While its capability should get bigger over time, these are the limits we’re starting out with.

Is the AI going to use my data?

It’s common practice for customer-facing AIs to use interactions with you for learning. Ours is no different. However, we realize this is a big technological advancement and want to be fully transparent about how it affects your data.

We use OpenAI as a third-party provider of AI for PDF summarization. The only data stored by OpenAI is the summary generated by our tool – this is to reduce the waiting time when you take your next action. Outside of this, no data is stored by OpenAI.

Anyone with access to the Summarize tool will be informed of how it uses your data and need to consent before they can summarize anything.

Who can use the Summarize tool?

It’s currently only available on the Pro plan – we want you to be the first to test-drive our PDF summarization capabilities.

As with the majority of AI tools, it will learn from you when you use it. This is why we have not currently rolled out to Business and Enterprise customers – we appreciate you have data privacy compliance needs and want to ensure you’re still able to tick all your boxes.

Is AI any good at summarizing PDFs?

Full transparency: a recent study commissioned by the Australian government found AI summarizers are worse than humans when it comes to incorporating context and nuance into their summaries. They were also worse at fact-checking.

These are fair criticisms, but they’re not applicable to the way Lumin’s Summarize tool is used.

Delegating the summary process to an AI doesn’t mean putting your final output at the whims of LLM cliché and nonsense. It means enabling you to speed-read documents and power through top-line highlights, so you can action your own work much faster.

Human context and nuance are king, but efficiency is queen.

Asking an AI summarizer to paraphrase a lengthy court document; risky. Using it to generate bullet points for skim reading, enabling you to flick through those court document pages at super speed? Fantastic.

Summarize is a tool designed for support. It doesn’t take control, but it watches your back: scanning the terrain, identifying key points, and giving you information you need to make the right decisions.

Whether you’re flying through a dense legal document or gliding over study notes, you can keep your eyes on the horizon. Summarize has your back.

There is no added cost to access the Summarize tool. It’s available on our Pro plan now – and will be available on further plans in the future.