Generate an excerpt

The excerpt is the short summary of a page that the intranet shows wherever the page is listed: in cards and listings, in widgets, in search results and in the answers the AI assistant gives. A good excerpt tells a colleague in a sentence or two what the page is for, so they can decide whether to open it.

If Agento Intelligence is set up on your intranet, the Excerpt box has a Generate button. It sends the title and content of the page to the AI, which writes a summary of about 50 words and puts it in the box. You then check it, change what you want, and save the page in the usual way.

The AI writes a first draft. It does not publish anything, and nothing is saved until you select Update or Publish.

Before you start

  • An administrator must have switched on the Excerpt generator, on the Writing tools tab of the Agento Intelligence settings. See Setup Agento Intelligence.
  • The button appears for anyone who can edit content, on every kind of content that has an Excerpt box: pages, tasks, news, blog posts, events, projects, training courses, vacancies and teams among them.
  • If you cannot see the Excerpt box on the edit screen, select Screen Options at the top right of the screen and tick Excerpt. The box then appears below the main content.

Generate an excerpt

  1. Write the title and the content of the page. The button reads what is in the editor at that moment, so you do not need to save first.
  2. Scroll down to the Excerpt box and select Generate. The button changes to Generating… while it works. This usually takes a few seconds, and up to a minute on a busy or smaller AI server.
  3. If the box already has an excerpt, the intranet asks whether to replace it. Select Cancel to keep what is there.
  4. Read the summary that appears in the box and change it as you would any other text.
  5. Save the page.

Select Generate again if you want a different version. Each attempt is written fresh, so the wording will vary.

Generate an excerpt editor panel

Check the excerpt before you save

The AI reads only the page in front of it and is told to use only facts from that page. It still gets things wrong, and the mistakes are the kind that read well. In testing on a real intranet, a piece of guidance that explained when a practice is prohibited came back as a summary of how to do it. Read every generated excerpt as carefully as you would read a colleague’s draft, and check:

  • The meaning. Does the summary say what the page says, including any “must”, “must not” and “only if”?
  • Dates, names and numbers. The AI is told to copy them exactly, but check them against the page.
  • The length. Most summaries are under 50 words, but some run a little over. Cut anything a reader does not need in a listing.
  • Quotation marks. The AI is asked to avoid them and sometimes uses them anyway. Remove them.
  • Anything the AI could not know. On a long page it reads only the opening two thousand words or so, so a summary of a long policy reflects the start of it.

The excerpt is your words once you save it. It appears under your page’s title across the intranet, so it deserves the same care as the page.

What the AI writes for each kind of content

The summary is shaped to suit the kind of page, because a good excerpt does a different job on a news story and a task.

  • News, news updates and team news: the opening a journalist would write. The most newsworthy fact first, with who, what, when, where and why as far as the story gives them, and no background or quotations.
  • Blog posts: who is writing or who the post is about, what they did or learned, and why it is worth a colleague’s time, written in the third person.
  • Tasks and guidance: what the guidance helps a colleague to do and who it applies to, starting with a verb such as Find out how to, Claim, Book or Report. It is told not to list the steps.
  • Events: what the event is, who it is for and what people will get from attending. The date, time and place are left out, because the intranet shows them beside the excerpt.
  • Projects: what the project sets out to achieve, what is changing, who is affected and the current stage or key date.
  • Vacancies: the role, where it is and what the person will do, with the closing date if the page gives one.
  • Training courses: what people will learn or be able to do afterwards, and who the course is for.
  • Teams: what the team does and what colleagues should come to it for.
  • Everything else, including ordinary pages: what the page is about and why it is useful, starting with what the reader gets or can do.

Whatever the kind of page, the AI is told to write one paragraph of plain British English in the active voice, to address the reader as you where that is natural, to avoid starting with the words “This page” or with the title, and never to write as “we” or “our”.

Where the excerpt appears

  • Cards and listings, such as the news, events, projects, training and team listings and category pages, show the first 25 words of the excerpt. Put the point in the first sentence.
  • Widgets, such as the feature news widget when it is set to show excerpts, also show the first 25 words.
  • Search results show a snippet built around the words the person searched for. It is taken from your excerpt or from the page content, whichever matches the search better. The words in your excerpt also count towards whether the page is found at all.
  • The AI assistant reads the excerpt as part of the page when it indexes the intranet, so a clear excerpt helps it find the page and describe it in an answer.
  • Team pages list their sub-teams with each team’s excerpt as its description.

If the Excerpt box is empty, the intranet makes an excerpt from the first 30 words of the content, followed by an ellipsis. That is often a heading, a list or half a sentence, which is why a written excerpt is better. See Add a new task.

Write a good excerpt yourself

You do not have to use the button. Whether you write the excerpt or edit a generated one, the same things make it work:

  • Say what the page lets the reader do or find out, in the first sentence.
  • Keep it to two or three sentences, and under 50 words.
  • Use the words staff use, because the excerpt is searched. See Learn the difference between tags and keywords.
  • Do not repeat the title, and do not start with “This page”.
  • Leave out anything the intranet shows beside the excerpt anyway, such as the date and place of an event.

If the button does not work

  • There is no Generate button. The Excerpt generator is switched off in the Agento Intelligence settings, or Agento Intelligence is not installed. Ask your intranet administrator.
  • “Add a title and some content first.” The page has too little content to summarise. Write the content, then try again.
  • “Could not generate an excerpt: The AI service did not respond.” The AI server is busy, switched off or unreachable. Try again in a minute. If it keeps happening, tell your intranet administrator, who can check the System status tab of the Agento Intelligence settings.
  • The summary is poor. Select Generate again for a fresh attempt, or write the excerpt yourself. A page with a clear opening paragraph gets a better summary than one that begins with a list or a table.

The PDF to page tool

If your intranet has the PDF to page tool, the draft page it creates from a PDF already has a generated excerpt, whether or not the Generate button is switched on. Check it in the same way before you publish the page. See Setup Agento Intelligence.