How To Use Chat GPT-3 To Summarize A PDF Within Seconds


I’ve been doing so many university readings over the past term, and, naturally, like any other student, wanted an easy way out.

It struck me that CHAT GPT-3 would be a great tool to use to condense the laborious readings given to us before every class. Here’s how to use CHAT GPT-3 to summarize a PDF within seconds:

  • Copy paste the text (no more than 2 pages at a time)
  • Write the prompt : “Please summarize the following paragraphs into key bullet points” followed by the copied text.
  • Repeat the above two steps until you have managed to convert the entire document into bullet points
  • Lastly, write the prompt: “Please write all the bullet points generated by you in the form of a combined list”
  • This will provide you with all the points combines in a single list.

How Accurately Does CHAT GPT Summarize A PDF?

I actually went through the entire 12 page document manually and then read the summary generated by CHAT GPT-3. I found the summary to be fairly accurate. It missed a point here or there and added a few repetitive summary points, but overall, keeping in mind that it gave about 95% accuracy in the summary in a fraction of the time- I found it to be extremely useful

What Is the Prompt Limit on CHAT GPT-3?

Currently, CHAT GPT-3 has put a limitation in the number of characters you can input in a single prompt. The prompt limit is approximately 1500 words or 2048 ‘tokens’ to be more accurate. This comes to roughly 2 pages of a standard pdf/word document with single line spaces.

This is the reason why you currently have to divide the entire pdf into sections and ask CHAT GPT to summarize the text in batches of approximately two pages.

This isn’t all CHAT GPT does though.

There are a few other cool use cases for CHAT GPT-3 to provide you a quick summary of books, videos and journals. Here are the details:

Can Chat GPT Summarize Books?

Chat GPT-3 can provide a high level summary of some (but not all) books. Simply ask it to provide a bullet point summary of the book you desire. I asked it to give a summary of “Art of War” by Sun Tzu as well as “The Mom Test” – I found it to be slightly better for the Art of War- perhaps because it is a book in thepublic domain (out of copyright restrictions).

See the photographs below

Can CHAT-GPT Summarize Academic Articles?

At this point, CHAT-GPT might do a half-decent job at summarizing academic articles in the same fashion as I described above (copy paste the text and ask it to summarize)- however, it has no understanding of what it says, hence is much more likely to give wrong outputs. It also cannot understand charts and figures currently which are a big part of many academic articles.

Overall, it is not very useful in it’s current form for summarizing academic articles.

Can CHAT GPT-3 Summarize YouTube Videos?

Chat GPT can work extremely well for summarizing a YouTube video. To do so, open any video on YouTube, and click on the icon that shows 3 horizontal buttons (below the bottom right corner of the video) and click on ‘Show Transcript’. A panel will open up that shows the speech transcript, which can be copied into CHAT GPT-3 with the prompt “Please summarize the following”

In fact, I have started to use CHAT GPT-3 for writing YouTube video descriptions for my podcast on YouTube ‘Dot On Target‘. It’s pretty neat.

Can Chat GPT Summarize Websites?

While it is possible to copy paste a webpage’s text into CHAT GPT-3, it can become onerous very quickly. However, there are multiple google chrome extensions that have launched recently that utilise Chat GPT-3 to automatically summarize a webpage. I liked this Chrome extension that summarizes webpages and is quite convenient .

On the whole- you should start using Chat GPT-3 more and more if you aren’t already. Summarizing text, YouTube videos, etc- are just one of the millions of use cases. I thought about these because I’ve spent the past 2 months playing around with Chat GPT-3 and reading about it.

I strongly encourage you to do the same.

Shubhankar Chaudhary

I used to operate a Defence Startup. In my free time, I like to write about personal growth, entrepreneurship and my journey on both these fronts.

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