Recently long-pressed a word in a physical book, attempting to pop up a dictionary definition. All I achieved was mild embarrassment and a perfect fingernail indent on the page.
There are other digital interactions I would love to have in my meatspace life. A quick-save before tackling a power tool task, or a mute button for inconsiderate train passengers.
The recent addition of AI Summarize to Help Scout got me thinking about places an instant summary would be very handy in the real world:
- When you are mid-dinner-prep and your toddler is telling you a very long story about a dinosaur.
- When your friend, a passionate fan of a long-running series, thinks you need to be "caught up" on years of storylines before you can watch a 22m episode with them.
- When you pick up an airport business best seller that buries 3 decent ideas inside 220 pages of padding2.
Until that day, instantly summarizing long customer service conversations in your help desk is worth celebrating. If you have ever opened up a support interaction halfway through and watched the scrollbar shrink into nothingness as all those past emails load in, you know how much work just grasping the basics can be.
If you're lucky one of your colleagues has already left a good summary, but not even Timothy Dexter is lucky every time. So you scroll back and work your way through, because you are diligent...and because we've all been on the other side of conversations where it is obvious that nobody has scrolled back more than two emails.
AI tools built on large language models are really good at summarizing writing. Having a decent bullet point gist available for any conversation at the click of a button is a huge win. It will give you enough to start moving in the right direction, even if it doesn't cover everything. Which, of course, it won't.
Every summary, human generated or otherwise, is a form of lossy compression. Things have to be left out, nuances lost. That's the whole point. A summary is necessarily embedding judgments about what is important and what is less so.
Use those summaries to route issues, speed up your responses, and guide some decisions. Hugely valuable. But don't forget that there is more to read. When conversations are complex or fraught, there is important information in the specific words people use, even the way they punctuate their sentences, that might shape how you respond.
It's like students knowing when they can get away with just watching the movie, and when they need to read the book. Make the right call.
1 Australian Individual
2 I do know about Blinkist and the like.
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