Cronycle lets you auto summarize curated articles to save you lots of time and to keep you in control. Content curation — whether for personal learning, sharing knowledge, or content marketing — is a time consuming activity. It’s also an incredibly important and valuable activity for your organization, and it’s most powerful when you add context and your own take on the content you’re sharing.
Summaries are particularly useful as they get published with your board content, whether to newsletters, WordPress plugins, social media, messaging apps, and wherever and however you distribute insights.
How to summarize articles in Cronycle
First things first: let’s look at how summaries can be added manually.
Summaries in Cronycle boards allow you to type a small amount of text (up to 1,000 characters) which you can use to introduce an article, tweet, group of content, etc., or to express your point of view on it or add critical context. On the boards, summaries are visible right above the content. They also get published with your board content — to newsletters, WordPress plugins, social media, messaging apps and more.
To add a summary, you first need to save the article you want to summarize on a board. This can be done with the pin icon in a feed, or with our content clipper, or by adding a link on the board directly.
Once saved, click on “Add summary” in the article tile.
If you are saving from feeds, use the board tile preview on the right:
The same tile preview is also visible from the content reader on the board, so you can create a summary while reading an article:
After you click on “Add summary,” simply type your brief summarization, up to 1,000 characters. When you are done, click Save.
Back on the board, each summary is visible right above its relevant content:
How can auto summarizing articles save you time?
Let’s look at a few possible ways entering your own custom summary can be a big time-saver. Consider these possible scenarios:
Find relevant articles
Leslie is collecting content onto a Cronycle board shared with colleagues working on the same topic. Collectively, they add about 10 new articles or videos daily. Unfortunately, getting an idea of what each piece of content is about is not always easy from the short excerpt visible (often pulled from the beginning of the content). Leslie (and her colleagues) can generate a summary for each important article (they can all be given rights to create, save, discard, and edit summaries as well). Giving all team members the ability to create summaries both saves precious time and enhances collaboration and information sharing.
Prepare information to share
When an article is ready to be shared to a wider audience, Leslie and her team already have a big part of the work of summarization completed. In fact, key words and names usually will have already been added to the article auto summary and are ready to be reviewed, revised, or expanded upon. This is where human judgement takes over from automation. Only a skilled and knowledgeable person or team can deliver a personal and enhanced introductory summary that will resonate with the audience, but being able to work from an automated summary (instead of starting from scratch) is certainly a huge time saver.
Scale content marketing
Li is in quite a different situation from Leslie. He does content curation for content marketing purposes for his agency’s clients. He has to collect A LOT of content and submit it to his clients for approval. Writing summaries of articles or extracting key sentences manually are both slow processes that add up to many hours weekly, considering the mass of information he needs to propose.
With Cronycle, Li can auto summarize each article, save it, and/or edit it when it needs to be customized to the client’s context. Simply getting some key words and names in the summary field first helps save a lot of time…but getting key sentences is even better!
How to auto summarize curated articles in Cronycle
Start a new summary
Just like for a manually generated summary, click on Add summary. In the pop-up showing the summary text field, click on the Auto Summarize button.
You’ll immediately see a short bit of text appear in the text box above the article. This is the automatically generated summary.
Now you have three options of what to do with the automatically generated summary displayed:
- Discard the generated summary completely, either by deleting the text and writing over it with your own text, or by clicking on CANCEL.
- Save the generated summary as your summary by clicking on SAVE, and then close the pop-up window.
- Edit the summary by clicking in the box to add, delete, or modify words as needed. The generated summary is normal text you can revise as you wish.
Whether you save the summary that was generated as-is or you edit and revise it before you save it, the summary you save is the summary that will be visible on the board and will be published if and when you do so.
Edit a summary
Later, when you click again on the edited summary of an article, you can see that the Auto Summarize button is there and available to be clicked again. If you had previously removed or revised the auto summary and saved your own, and now you click on the Auto Summarize button, the original automatically generated summary will be displayed and will take the place of your own custom summary. But don’t worry: your custom summary is not lost forever. Simply click on the Undo Auto Summary button, and the last version of your custom/revised summary (whatever version existed just before you clicked on Auto Summarize) is restored.
Note that auto summary is currently only available for articles — voice in videos and podcasts are not summarized, nor are Twitter Conversations or groups of content (Story Arcs).
How does it work behind the scenes?
We generate summaries for articles using SpacY an open-source advanced natural language processing library. The copy of the article is submitted to be summarized, which then returns the summary you see in the text input. At this point, we save the summary on our side so you can re-generate it again (it will always be the same text). We do not send any other information to the summarizer services. If you require use of a specific summarizer, we can accommodate that request, provided they have an API. Please note: our current setting is to get two sentences from the summarizer.
Let us know if you require any summarizer customization!
The ability to generate an auto summary for your curated articles is a great example of technology lending a hand in saving you valuable time in completing an important activity for contextualizing and making sense of the content you curate. You remain in control while working more efficiently in response to suggested key words, phrases, and sentences, thanks to Cronycle’s Auto Summarize feature.
