Too Long; Didn't Read

Gist showing key topics and related sentences

The Problem

Getting information from long documents can be very time-consuming, and can often be stressful. For example, shortly before a meeting, your manager may send you a long document to read for discussion in the meeting. In another case, you may have collected many relevant contents from different sources and stored them in a single document, which eventually becomes very long. Often, many people delay reading long contents, and when asked, they say: “too long, didn’t read”.

The Solution:

This app helps users to effectively handle long documents. It extracts major topics and insights from a long document, and organizes the information in a format such that you can get the gist of the content in a quick way.

After processing, meaningful words or phrases representing major concepts or topics of the content are displayed like a Table of Contents. Each word is clickable. When clicked, a number of sentences that are identified as carrying the most amount of information about the concept are then displayed, giving you a good amount of information about the concept or topic as being discussed in the document. By clicking through the concepts or topics, one can quickly get the gist of the content, and can decide when or how much to read further.

With this tool, instead of spending a lot of time struggling with the content, or saying “Too long, didn’t read”, users can at least say that they have gotten some pretty good ideas about major topics in the long document.