SummaryLens -- A Smartphone App for Exploring Interactive Use of Automated Text Summarization in Everyday Life
This work proposes an incremental application for bringing AI summarization to a broad audience, including support for users with low vision, low literacy, or dyslexia.
The authors tackled the problem of making automated text summarization accessible for everyday use by developing SummaryLens, a smartphone app that scans and summarizes physical text documents, with a first usability study indicating noteworthy potential.
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.