Summarize Cli

What This Skill Does

The Summarize CLI skill provides a robust interface for the summarize binary, allowing OpenClaw agents to distill complex information into concise formats. Whether you are dealing with lengthy web articles, academic PDF papers, images containing text, audio files, or YouTube video transcripts, this skill automates the extraction and synthesis of key points. By integrating directly into the agent's environment, it eliminates the manual overhead of reading through vast amounts of data, providing high-quality summaries that can be output as plain text, structured markdown, or machine-readable JSON for further downstream processing.

Installation

To install this skill, use the ClawHub CLI: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/164149043/summarize-cli. Note that this skill requires the summarize binary to be installed on your system. You can easily set this up using Homebrew by running brew install steipete/tap/summarize to ensure the tool is available in your shell path.

Use Cases

This skill is indispensable for professionals and researchers who need to stay informed without being overwhelmed. Common use cases include: summarizing long research papers, parsing meeting transcripts or audio recordings to extract action items, converting complex web documentation into quick-reference markdown notes, and extracting data from images. Developers can leverage the JSON output format to pipe results directly into automated pipelines or logging systems.

Example Prompts

1. "Summarize the article at https://example.com/deep-dive-into-ai and give me a medium-length markdown summary."
2. "Please read the file local_meeting_notes.pdf and generate a short summary of the key decisions."
3. "Summarize this YouTube video https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ and output the result in JSON format so I can process the data."

Tips & Limitations

To get the best results, always specify the desired output format (--format) if you intend to use the output in another script or application. While the tool is powerful, note that it depends on the availability of the input file or URL—if a website is behind a strict paywall or a file is corrupted, the summarization may fail. For very long documents, use the --length option to ensure the agent focuses on high-level concepts rather than exhaustive detail.