AI21 Labs launches AI-based tool that summarizes a document within seconds

Israeli artificial intelligence startup A21 Labs, founded by Prof. Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, and Prof. Amnon Shashua, launched on Tuesday a new product named Wordtune Read. The AI-based reading companion is designed to help professionals across a range of industries and academia navigate the issue of information overload. Wordtune Read analyses and summarizes a document within seconds, enabling users to read long and complex text more efficiently and on average 75% faster.

According to new research conducted in the UK, employees and students spend almost an hour (56 minutes) a day reading for work-related purposes, which includes articles and reports. Over a third (37%) have admitted to suffering work-related “reading fatigue” and one in ten (9%) say they no longer read for pleasure due to this. Wordtune Read addresses this pain point by summarizing the key information from a document quickly, succinctly and accurately, improving productivity to save workers and students approximately 42 minutes a day.

“The knowledge that can be obtained from reading is powerful, but most of us don’t have time to consume all the information we need,” said Yoav Shoham, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of AI21 Labs. “The fundamental way we read has barely changed since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and we wanted to challenge this through innovation.”

Users simply upload a PDF or copy and paste a link of the text they want to read into Wordtune Read and within seconds, short snippets appear alongside the text which identify and summarize the main themes of the document and help users rapidly decipher complex language.

“With Wordtune Read, we’ve gone beyond key sentence extraction to abstraction, creating a true thought companion,” continued Yoav Shoham. “Unlike other reading assistants which pull out key sentences, we’ve built a tool that is able to summarize text - a capability that is a lot more complex than rephrasing a sentence as it requires a deeper understanding of broader context. This way, the tool is able to help people cut a long story short quickly and accurately.”