SummaryLens -- A Smartphone App for Exploring Interactive Use of Automated Text Summarization in Everyday Life

TL;DR

SummaryLens is a mobile app that uses automated text summarization and text-to-speech to help users quickly understand physical documents, supporting diverse user needs and demonstrating potential in everyday life.

Contribution

This paper introduces SummaryLens, a novel mobile tool integrating text summarization and speech to enhance interaction with physical texts for general and special user groups.

Findings

Usability study indicates high potential for everyday use.

Supports low-vision, low-literate, and dyslexic users.

Open-source prototype encourages further research.

Abstract

We present SummaryLens, a concept and prototype for a mobile tool that leverages automated text summarization to enable users to quickly scan and summarize physical text documents. We further combine this with a text-to-speech system to read out the summary on demand. With this concept, we propose and explore a concrete application case of bringing ongoing progress in AI and Natural Language Processing to a broad audience with interactive use cases in everyday life. Based on our implemented features, we describe a set of potential usage scenarios and benefits, including support for low-vision, low-literate and dyslexic users. A first usability study shows that the interactive use of automated text summarization in everyday life has noteworthy potential. We make the prototype available as an open-source project to facilitate further research on such tools.