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Generate concise summaries of long text, articles, or documents using large language models.

Problem

You have long text content—articles, transcripts, documents—that needs to be summarized. Processing each piece manually is time-consuming and inconsistent.

Solution

What’s in this recipe:
  • Summarize text using OpenAI GPT models
  • Customize summary style with prompts
  • Process multiple documents automatically
You add a computed column that calls an LLM to generate summaries. When you insert new text, summaries are generated automatically.

Setup

WARNING: Ignoring invalid distribution ~orch (/opt/miniconda3/envs/pixeltable/lib/python3.11/site-packages)
WARNING: Ignoring invalid distribution ~orch (/opt/miniconda3/envs/pixeltable/lib/python3.11/site-packages)
WARNING: Ignoring invalid distribution ~orch (/opt/miniconda3/envs/pixeltable/lib/python3.11/site-packages)
WARNING: Ignoring invalid distribution ~orch (/opt/miniconda3/envs/pixeltable/lib/python3.11/site-packages)
WARNING: Ignoring invalid distribution ~orch (/opt/miniconda3/envs/pixeltable/lib/python3.11/site-packages)
WARNING: Ignoring invalid distribution ~orch (/opt/miniconda3/envs/pixeltable/lib/python3.11/site-packages)
Note: you may need to restart the kernel to use updated packages.

Load sample text

Connected to Pixeltable database at: postgresql+psycopg://postgres:@/pixeltable?host=/Users/pjlb/.pixeltable/pgdata
Created directory ‘summarize_demo’.
<pixeltable.catalog.dir.Dir at 0x30d758b10>
Created table ‘articles’.
Inserting rows into `articles`: 2 rows [00:00, 316.21 rows/s]
Inserted 2 rows with 0 errors.
2 rows inserted, 4 values computed.

Generate summaries

Add a computed column that generates summaries using GPT:
Added 2 column values with 0 errors.
2 rows updated, 2 values computed.
Added 2 column values with 0 errors.
2 rows updated, 2 values computed.

Custom summary styles

You can customize the summary format by changing the prompt:
Added 2 column values with 0 errors.
Added 2 column values with 0 errors.
2 rows updated, 2 values computed.

Automatic processing

New articles are automatically summarized when inserted:
Inserting rows into `articles`: 1 rows [00:00, 411.57 rows/s]
Inserted 1 row with 0 errors.
1 row inserted, 6 values computed.

Explanation

Prompt engineering for summaries:
Cost optimization:
  • Use gpt-4o-mini for most summarization tasks (fast and affordable)
  • Use gpt-4o for complex documents requiring deeper understanding
  • Summaries are cached—you only pay once per article and stuand toofor trL para

See also

Last modified on June 24, 2026