The latest episode (number 8) of The Family History AI Show podcast has two items on using AI for summarization.
- FamilySearch now has AI-powered summarization in their “Full-Text Search” experiment. This allows researchers to quickly grasp the essence of lengthy documents, saving valuable time and effort.
I’d previously used the facility at https://www.familysearch.org/search/full-text with a search for “William H Northwood” to find a document of interest — snippet below.
What’s new is “Summarize the document.” Here’s what it produced.
William H. Northwood and Amanda Northwood sold various lots in Leavenworth County, Kansas to Frank Friedl on January 9th, 1891, also as a mortgage to secure the payment of $400. The land can be sold if the payment is not made.
William H. Northwood and Amanda Northwood (sellers)
Frank Friedl (buyer).
The summary is accurate, although buried in a summary of other material on the page.
- Starting at 24:59 in the podcast, Steve Little talks about summarization, which along with extraction, generation and translation, are core things large language models (LLMs) can do. He suggests a basic prompt to any LLM “You are a professional genealogist, summarize this text.” Link the document, or copy it below. It will provide a summary, and a variation of the summary if you do it again. The summary will remove complexity. Be aware the complexity may be important, and LLMs make mistakes. Experiment by selecting a LLM from the resource list below. Try several!
Then follow on in a conversation to get better results:
- Be specific about the type of information you need
- Specify the desired length or key points to include
- Experiment with different prompt structures
There’s more in the podcast .
Resource List
Meta AI: https://meta.ai
OpenAI (ChatGPT): https://openai.com/chatgpt
Anthropic (Claude): https://www.anthropic.com
Google (Gemini): https://gemini.google.com/app
Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/
Microsoft Copilot: https://copilot.microsoft.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com
Apple AI: https://www.apple.com/ai