At the ongoing I/O 2022 developer conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took center stage to boast about the rapid improvement in the use of AI technology. One of the main services where the company uses this is Google Docs. As you can already see from the title, you no longer need to read long documents and can get automatically generated summaries in Google Docs.

Yes, if you receive a multi-page document just minutes before a meeting, you can now get an AI-generated summary for the document with a single click in Google Docs. How does it work? The AI model behind this feature uses language understanding, information compression, and natural language generation to deliver a reliable summary of your document. Pichai says this feature "marks a major step forward for natural language processing."

As for how to access the "automatic summary" feature, the table of contents that appears in the left pane of Google Docs includes a new "Summary" section at the top. Just click to expand the "Summary" section and read the TL;DR if you don't have time to go through the whole text.

Also, while the summaries are automatically generated by Google, you can make manual edits to the text to provide a more accurate TL; DR for your documents. This feature was first announced in February 2022 but is now on its way to a wider audience.