4 AI Tools to Condense Text, Audio, Video

Generative artificial intelligence is powerful for analyzing and summarizing content. Here are four innovative tools for that task.

Claude for PDFs

Reading long reports is challenging in an era of information overload. I’ve tried many document condensers, but nothing was better than ChatGPT. Then I found Anthropic’s Claude, which analyzes and condenses text, including PDFs.

To test, I uploaded to Claude the PDF of Google’s patent in 2015 for classifying sites as low-quality. Claude produced an informed, condensed explanation without too much detail.

Per Claude, the patent:

Assigns a quality score for each resource linking to a site.
Groups the resources based on their score ranges.
Counts the number of resources in each group.
Calculates a weighted average link quality score for the site using the distribution of resources in the groups.
Classifies the site as low quality if the link quality score is below a threshold.
Can decrease rankings in search results of low-quality sites.

In short, it classifies sites as low quality based on their backlinks.

Claude allows for adjustments in the prompts for more detailed summaries, definitions, chapter creation, and more. Like ChatGPT, Claude saves all dialog so users can return and request more refinements and data.

Use Claude to:

Create takeaways of your own content.
Understand long and complicated documents.
Summarize content in different formats, such as paragraphs, tables, or lists.
Create glossaries from any document.

Claude pulled these definitions from Google’s patent.

Pull definitions | need to know from this patent (ns) Here are some key definitions from the patent document: <— Site - A collection of resources, such as a website hosted on web servers accessible over the internet. Resource - A specific web page, document, image, etc. Resources make up a site. Link - A reference from one resource to another, such as a hyperlink. Resources can link to other resources both within a site and on external sites. Linking data - Data structure specifying links between resources and sites, used to identify links to a given site. Resource quality score - A score representing the quality of a resource. Used to assign resources to quality groups. Resource quality group - A group of resources defined by a score range, such as "vital", "good", and "bad". Diversity filtering - Removing duplicate or highly similar resources before analysis, such as resources from the same site. Boilerplate - Standard reusable content sections like navigation bars, not useful for quality analysis. Link quality score - Score calculated for a site based on the distribution of resource quality scores of inbound links. Used to classify site quality. Low quality site - A site classified as low quality based on its link quality score falling below a defined threshold. Ranking score - Score used to rank search results by relevance and quality. Low quality sites can have ranking scores decreased.

Claude analyzes and condenses text, such as a PDF for a Google patent. Click image to enlarge.

Glasp for Web Pages

Glasp condenses text from web pages. Users highlight sections of a page. Glasp will then create a summary while preserving the original for comparison.

Use Glasp to:

Curate your content for newsletters, social posts, or blogs.
Educate your team by sharing summarized resources.

Glasp's summary of an article entitled "How to Use Twitter for Thought Leaders" from Animalz.com

Glasp condenses text from highlighted sections of web pages, such as this example from Animalz, a content marketing site. Click image to enlarge.

Spext for YouTube Videos

Spext condenses and organizes audio and video. It works well for podcasts and YouTube videos by allowing users to choose the sections to analyze.

Spext breaks YouTube videos into chapters (with text), allowing viewers to navigate to relevant parts and skim the rest. There’s also a search option to find info within the video.

Use Spext to:

Turn extended product demos into shorter sections that are easier to navigate.
Create courses from long videos.
Create summaries and takeaways from your own videos.

Screenshot of a Spext page for applying a YouTube URL for takeaways and chapters.

Spext breaks YouTube videos into chapters, allowing viewers to navigate to relevant parts and skim the rest. Click image to enlarge.

Spoke for Slack

Slack is a terrific tool for internal communication and external collaborations, but it’s easily cluttered.

Spoke uses AI to generate daily digests of Slack channels. Provide Spoke access to Slack, and you won’t have to read all the threads. You’ll get a handy digest of the previous weekday by 9 a.m.