How can I summarise a very long PDF for free?

mapleleaf1010

Hi, I need to understand a 60 page PDF document. It's a mix of text, tables and diagrams.
How can I summarise it for free using an online tool?
Cheers.

DullGreyGuy

So you want to add a summary to it or you want some AI to summarise it for you so you dont have to read the whole document?

MeteredOut

60 pages means little. How many words? Different AI tools have different token limits (and a token is not necessarily 1 word). Getting one to summarise diagrams is going to be difficult, unless they are in textual format.

In the simplest form, if you can copy the text, and use an AI tool that accepts the volume of text you have you simply prompt your AI tool along the lines of

As a expert in <insert subject area for context setting>, review the following text and provide a summary of it in no more than <wordcount> words. Use a professional tone in your responses. The text is as follows: <paste text here>

If your 60 pages is 10s of thousands of words, you're going to struggle to do it for free.

Neil_Jones

Wouldn't it be easier and considerably less effort in the first place just to read it, rather than put a lot more effort into finding a solution to summarise it?

Jenna_Appleseed

Neil_Jones said:

Wouldn't it be easier and considerably less effort in the first place just to read it, rather than put a lot more effort into finding a solution to summarise it?

If you use something like chatgbt / bing chat to summarise it, your going to have to read the whole thing anyway to make sure the chatbot hasn't just made something vaguely plausible up. 

MeteredOut

Option for completely free - run the AI model on your own machine. I set this up yesterday (2019 Macbook Pro) - its much slower than using ChatGPT but no costs

https://dev.to/timesurgelabs/how-to-run-llama-2-on-anything-3o5m

(this uses's Meta's LLama model, rather than ChatGPTs)