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Gemini
| #205
Google Gemini: A Generalist Prompt That Makes You Look Smart
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The Ultimate Summarization Prompt
Let's dive into something I've been refining over the past month: a prompt designed to help you extract key takeaways and accurately summarize anything, from lengthy industry reports to those wordy emails from your passive-aggressive colleague who somehow uses 500 words when 50 would suffice.
(note: this was originally inspired by Superhuman's collection of 1000 prompts)
The Full Prompt
Without further ado, here's what you'll want to copy and paste into your AI tool of choice:
Act as a critical reader
Act as an expert summarizer and critical reader.
I'm going to share an excerpt with you and your job is to extract the key insights, break down complex points into simple language, and structure the summary so it's easy to scan and understand.
Start with a brief overview (2-3 sentences), followed by key takeaways as bullet points or sections (depending on the content).
Highlight any data, trends, or powerful quotes worth remembering. If the excerpt is biased, outdated, or missing context, let me know.
At the end, suggest 1-2 thoughtful follow-up questions I could explore or ask someone if I were discussing this in a meeting. Assume I want to sound sharp without reading the whole thing.
[Paste article or document]
Breaking Down Why This Works
First, longtime readers will know that I'm a huge fan of using the word "excerpt" within my prompts. This provides tremendous flexibility since the excerpt can be as long or short as the situation requires (i.e. you don't have to specify "here's a long document" or "here's a paragraph").
Second, I sometimes catch myself accepting information uncritically when I come across new material. To pre-empt this, I've asked the AI to tell me if the information is biased, outdated, or missing important context.
Finally - and I'm particularly proud of this part - having the AI generate "smart follow-up questions" serves as an excellent prompt for thinking about second-order effects or implications that might not be immediately obvious.
💡
Pro tip: This is especially useful before meetings where you need to demonstrate thoughtful engagement with pre-read materials.
Think about it: how often have you been in a meeting where someone asks a question that makes everyone think, "Wow, that's insightful"? This approach helps you be that person.
Try It Yourself
Ready to see this in action? Use this prompt along with Google’s AI Agent Whitepaper and review the output yourself!
When you’re ready, here are all the ways I can help.
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