Summarising Submissions (and Other Documents)

Goldilocks submission summaries - Not too long, not too short. (*Image generated by Dall-E under instruction from ChatGPT*).

February 2023

Right from the beginning there has been a huge array of third-party platforms and applications that were built on top of the ChatGPT engine to perform specific tasks. One of those platforms I was trying out back in February was Writesonic. It had an extensive library with dozens of tools for specific tasks, such as providing ideas for articles, writing article outlines (or entire articles), writing product descriptions, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn articles, Company Bios, Real Estate Listings, Song Lyrics, you name it.

Three tools in particular caught my eye as being potentially very useful in the Resource Management field:

Text Summary
Content Shorten
Content Rephrase

The Writesonic website interface consists of some text boxes that you can copy/paste your contents into, and some drop-down menus to select things like the style of writing, language, and quality of output (that is, which version of ChatGPT you want to pay for). I should note at this point that Writesonic is a subscription-based service built on top of ChatGPT. If you already use the paid version of ChatGPT, then you would need to decide if it’s worth paying for it twice (to access all the Websonic tools).

Text Summary

Writesonic's Text Summary V2 tool enables you to either paste a web URL address or paste the full text from the article (length permitting). You then select whether you want a 'Human Like' or 'Key Points' summary of the article, and hit the generate button:

‘Human Like’ summary of an article on the web.

‘Key Points’ summary of a four-page submission.

How well does it do the job of summarising submissions? Well, this 'off the shelf' tool is probably too coarse - this four-page submission I made on a plan change was summarised into 10 points of submission by the good humans at Auckland Council. Writesonic's tool trimmed it back to four sentences.

Content Shorten

Writesonic's Content Shorten v2 tool enables a lot more refinement than the text summary tool. You can paste a paragraph or two (up to 1000 characters) of content into a box, describe the tone of voice, what language you want the answers to be in (British English avoids all the 'z' spellings), and to what quality (which ChatGPT version). It also lets you choose how many versions of output you want.

I generally found that requesting three versions was a good option, as there was generally at least one that I liked - think Goldilocks …

Writesonic has a handy interface that includes word and character counts of the outputs so you can compare them for length. It also has both copy and edit buttons that enable you to further tweak the words before or after copying them into the document you're working on.

Early this year I used this tool to speed up the process of summarising submissions on a Plan Change. The input character limit meant that I still needed to go through them all a paragraph at a time, which is a good way to keep human oversight. We all know how important submission summaries are to the Plan Change process, and how badly things can go if you get them wrong.

Content Rephrase

Have you ever found yourself knowing what you want to say, but struggling to string the words together in a way that reads how you want it to? The content rephrase tool is just what you need. Slap your word soup of ideas into the text box and it will produce multiple different versions of the thing you meant to say:

I find this a super useful tool for those times when you have either a mental blank or too many ideas coming at you all at once. You can literally slap your incoherent thoughts into the box, regardless of spelling grammar, or structure, and legible paragraphs will be produced. The tone of voice can be set within the rephrase tool, which is super handy for turning that dull personal or company bio into something a bit more fun and interesting!

My conclusions on this use case

If you are looking for a quick overview of an article or document so you can decide if you want to read it in full, then AI can be a huge time saver. However, if you think you might be able to use it to shortcut or automate the process of summarising submissions, then you can expect a world of trouble …

Aside from the fact that handwritten submissions still exist, not all electronic documents are equal when it comes to being machine-readable. Often you will discover (too late) that the time saved by using AI is less than the additional time it takes to ‘clean’ the data before you can paste it into ChatGPT or equivalent. I often found it is faster to read the full text and then dictate your own summary using good transcription software - the AI-driven ones like Transcribe that understand the Kiwi accent!

You need to think carefully about what you want to achieve, and then choose the right tool, or combination of tools for the job. Would I be happy for my well-considered submission or planning evidence to be automatically summarised into bullet points before being handed to a decision-maker? Nope, I would not.

ChatGPT Use Cases: Example #2