The discussion is about controlling the length of AI summaries. nathank suggests allowing users to request short or long versions of summaries, with the option to reveal the longer version with one click. EricGT questions the meaning of “short” and “long” in topics with many off-topic posts, proposing the use of a point cloud to find similarities in posts.
Falco mentions that customizing summarization style, including changing tone and style, is on the roadmap for release in early next year. markschmucker inquires about the status of controlling summary length and the use of single-sentence summaries.
Falco responds that single-sentence summaries are used for topic list summaries and are available via the API. The feature set for release is being finalized, with an announcement and documentation to follow. Customizing prompts, including controlling summary length, is still planned for release by Q2 2025.
After using AI summarization a bit, I find that the summaries are often too brief.
It would be very helpful to be able to request a short or a long version. Better yet, to automatically fetch both, serve the short version, and allow the long version to be revealed with one click.
Hi Nathan, nice to have a topic in common again. 
Knowing the background of the forums you manage, I have to ask if the topics are very focused on a single idea or can the topics be all over the place with many off-topic post.
The reason I ask is that while on some sites such as the ones related to your profession the users will tend to stay on topic but for other sites the users tend to consider a topic more like a discussion or chat on Discord and are all over the place.
When the post to the topic are on-topic, long and short have a much more understandable meaning but when many post are off-topic, what would that mean?
For me with many off-topic post in a topic I tend to think of the point cloud generated from the text used to find similarities in the post and then filter them down. With many post being on-topic the point cloud should be nicely concentrated but with many off-topic post you get many more point clouds that look like galaxies in the universe than one galaxy. Make sense?
It’s in our roadmap allowing users to further customize the summarization style, much like you described.
- Generate
- Regenerate
- Change type
- Change tone (formal/informal/etc)
- Change style (Paragraph/List/pros&cons)
- Edit
We plan on releasing this around early next year.
Is controlling the length still on the roadmap?
Also I see some requests are for a single-sentence summary, and others are for 400 words or less. The 400-word ones obviously are used for the summary, but are the single-sentence summaries used anywhere? And are they available via the API?
They are the topic list summaries like
They are serialized in the existing topic list routes when enabled and the requesting user can access to it.
We are finishing the feature set for release this week, and will have an announcement and documentation of it in the next days.
Customizing prompts is something we still want to do, and I hope to achieve it by Q2 2025.
