AI for Summarizing and Transcribing Documents

I listened to the Legacy Webinar, "AI and Genealogy: Trouble Ahead?", presented by Thomas MacEntee. He discussed using AI to summarize and transcribe documents. I tried this out, and it's really a great time saver! 

 

One of my grandmother's, Graciela del Castillo, was Nicaraguan. There isn't much published about Nicaraguan genealogy, and what's available. I was in contact with a Nicaraguan genealogy expert back in 2015. I've been going through his emails again as I work on my grandmother's line. He sent me a dozen emails with detailed information regarding Nicaraguan research. I was planning on summarizing the information and sharing it with a group I'm involved in. After listening to the webinar I decided to use AI to do it. Thomas MacEntee demonstrated three AI sites ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. I tried out all three sites. I love information presented in bulleted lists, and asked that the emails be summarized that way. 

 Here is one of the emails I asked for a bullet list summary for:

Here is what the three AI companies came up with: 

Perplexity came up with the most detailed summary. ChatGPT was in-between as far as details. Gemini provided the shortest summary. I like that Gemini provided an introduction in bold script (also liked being able to save the answers to my Google Docs). 

I decided to ask Perplexity and ChatGPT to provide a bold introduction to each bullet point. 

This is what Perplexity came up with:

This is what ChatGPT came up with:

ChatGPT didn't provide an introduction for each bullet point, as I asked. I like what they came up with anyway. Perplexity did exactly what I asked. 

I was about to get a pen and paper ready to start summarizing these emails. I'm glad I listened to the webinar first! I'm sure these summaries are better than what I would have come up with.