The idea of reading more articles and absorbing more information and world news is great – but not all of us have the free time or attention span to keep up to date with everything. Markup, primarily a document annotation app, has a neat feature that allows you to summarize any article from the web into easily-digestible snippets. To unlock this feature you need to set up an account with Markup.
Opening an article in-app
To summarize an article, you need to first open the web page of the article in the Markup app. Pull up the article in Safari (or your web browser of choice), and tap on the share icon at the bottom.
Scroll along the app thumbnails and tap on the icon for Markup. This will open an in-browser pop-up window, with some new tools at the bottom. Next, tap the icon in the bottom left corner (the arrow pointing to a document). This will open the article page in the app.
Summarizing an article
Once the page has loaded, tap on this same icon again to create a summary that captures the gist of the article. This will load up your article summary, giving you a brief breakdown of the article’s content.
Note: If you have the free version, you’ll only get a one sentence summary – which offers little more insight than the title itself. With a premium subscription you’ll unlock the maximum five sentence summary.
The app uses AI to select the most relevant information, and sometimes it can feel like a few key points may be missing. But we’ve been impressed overall by the quality of the summaries – and just like with any other AI, this feature should improve over time.
Maybe the best use of the feature is to gain a more in-depth skim of the content, as a taster, to see if you’re interested enough to read the full article. From the auto summary page, you can tap the icon in the bottom left corner to highlight the extracted sentences in the article itself. This allows you to get a little more info surrounding any of the key points without reading the entire article, or having to scroll through and attempt to find them for yourself.
In the future it would be nice to see the option to control the number of sentences extracted for your summary, which would be beneficial for longer articles, or to get an overview of research papers or material. Overall, Markup offers a nifty little feature which enables you to keep up to date on as many topics as you like. Happy skim-reading!