How to Summarize Text with OpenAI on Mac
Condense long articles, emails, and documents into clear summaries using OpenAI through Echoo. Select any text on your Mac, press a shortcut, and get an instant summary without leaving your current app.
Why This Combination Works
OpenAI's GPT models excel at identifying key points and distilling long content into concise, well-structured summaries. GPT-4o is particularly strong at maintaining accuracy while compressing information — it rarely hallucinates details or misses critical points. Its large context window handles lengthy documents, research papers, and email threads with ease.
Recommended Model
GPT-4o is the top choice for summarization. Its 128K token context window can process documents up to 100 pages long in a single request, and it produces summaries that capture nuance without oversimplifying. For quick summaries of shorter content like emails, GPT-4o Mini is fast and cost-effective.
Example Prompt
Summarize the following text in 3-5 concise bullet points. Focus on the key findings, decisions, or action items. Omit background information unless critical to understanding the main points. Return only the summary.
Setup Steps
Download Echoo
Install Echoo from echoo.ai. It lives in your Mac menu bar and works across every application.
Add your OpenAI API key
Open Echoo settings, go to the Providers tab, select OpenAI, and paste your API key from platform.openai.com.
Create a Summarize command
Set up a custom Summarize command in Echoo or use the built-in option. Select GPT-4o for handling long documents, or GPT-4o Mini for quick email summaries.
Highlight text and press the shortcut
Select the text you want summarized in any app, press your shortcut, and Echoo displays a clean summary you can paste anywhere.
Frequently Asked Questions
GPT-4o supports 128K tokens of context, which is roughly 100 pages of text. You can summarize entire research papers, lengthy reports, or long email threads in a single request without any content being cut off.
GPT-4o is highly reliable at capturing key points. For critical documents, you can customize your prompt to emphasize specific aspects like action items, financial figures, or deadlines to ensure nothing important is missed.
Summarizing a 5-page document with GPT-4o costs roughly one to two cents. For shorter texts like emails, it's a fraction of a cent. Most users spend well under a dollar per month on summarization.
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