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FOBIE.ai

Read this long thing for me and tell me what matters

A sixty-page tender, a lease, an hour-long recording. This job is about knowing what is in it, and specifically what in it is going to be a problem.

What a good result looks like

Use this to judge a demo. A tool that cannot do these is not doing the job, whatever it is called.

  • It surfaces the obligations, deadlines and costs, not just the themes.
  • It points to where in the document each point came from.
  • You can ask follow-up questions about a specific section.
  • It handles the length you actually have, not a two-page demo.

What usually goes wrong

The things people find out after they have paid.

  • A summary that omits the one clause that mattered is worse than not reading it, because you think you have read it.
  • Length limits are often much shorter than advertised once formatting is counted.
  • For anything you are going to sign, a summary is a way in, not a substitute.

6 tools that do this

How this list is ordered — and why money is not one of the reasons
  1. 1. How squarely the tool does this job. A tool built for this job comes before one that can be made to do it. A tool that needs wiring up comes last.
  2. 2. How much we actually know about it. A tool we have used ourselves comes before one we have only researched, which comes before one only a reader has written in about, which comes before one nobody has assessed. A tool low on this list is not bad. It is unknown.
  3. 3. How technical you need to be. Where the first two signals tie, the one a non-technical person can set up alone comes first. This site is for people who are not going to write code.
  4. 4. How recently we checked the listing. A listing we checked last month is worth more to you than one we checked last year, so it breaks the remaining ties. Listings we have never checked come last.

Nothing commercial appears on that list, and nothing commercial is given to the code that orders it. How we make money, and how you can check.

  1. ChatGPT

    by OpenAI

    Handles long documents you paste or upload; ask it for obligations and dates specifically.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  2. Claude

    by Anthropic

    Comfortable with very long documents in one go, which is the usual sticking point.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  3. Gemini

    by Google

    Summarises documents, and does it inside Google Docs if that is where they live.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  4. Microsoft 365 Copilot

    by Microsoft

    Summarises a Word document or a long thread in place.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help needed

  5. NotebookLM

    by Google

    Good on a set of related documents rather than one at a time.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  6. Perplexity

    by Perplexity AI

    Will summarise a page or a document, though it is built around searching rather than reading yours.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

Reviews against this job

Listed, not reviewedIt is in the directory. Nobody here has assessed it yet.

Nobody here has assessed any of these tools against this job yet. The listings above describe what each one is sold to do and how squarely it fits — which is real information — but none of it is a verdict, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Used one of these for this job? Tell us what happened — reader reports are published as reader reports, in your words, clearly labelled.

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