Summarizer API

Experimental: This is an experimental technology
Check the Browser compatibility table carefully before using this in production.

The Summarizer API summarizes a given body of text via a browser's internal AI model.

Concepts and usage

Writing a summary of a larger body of text is a common writing task, and one that AI is well-suited to. Typical use cases include:

  • Providing a summary of a full article so the reader can judge whether to read the whole thing.
  • Summarizing a meeting transcript so those joining the meeting late can get up to speed with what they've missed.
  • Summarizing a set of product reviews to quickly communicate overall sentiment.

The Summarizer API provides an asynchronous (Promise-based) mechanism for a website to feed a body of text into the browser's own internal AI model and request that it returns a summary of the text based on specified options.

This is done using the functionality made available by the Summarizer interface, in a two-step process:

  1. Create a Summarizer object instance using the Summarizer.create() static method, specifying options for what kind of summary you want written. Options include length, type (for example, "tl;dr" or key points), format (plain text or markdown), and input and output languages.

    Note: If you want to check whether the browser AI model is able to support your preferences, you can do so with the Summarizer.availability() static method.

  2. Run the Summarizer.summarize() instance method to request the summary.

After a Summarizer instance has been created, you can remove it again using the Summarizer.destroy() instance method. You can also cancel a pending create() or summarize() operation using an AbortController.

See Using the Summarizer API for a walkthrough of how the API works.

Interfaces

Summarizer Experimental

Contains all the functionality for the Summarizer API, including checking AI model availability, creating a new Summarizer instance, using it to generate a new summary, and more.

HTTP headers

Permissions-Policy; the summarizer directive

Controls access to the Summarizer API. Where a policy specifically disallows the use of the Summarizer API, any attempts to call the API's methods will fail with a NotAllowedError DOMException.

Security considerations

The specification requires that a user has recently interacted with the page when creating Summarizer objects (transient user activation is required).

In addition, the specification controls access to the API via summarizer Permissions-Policy directives.

Examples

For a full example, see Using the Summarizer API.

Specifications

Specification
Writing Assistance APIs
# summarizer-api

Browser compatibility

See also