Data summaries

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Who can use this

Anyone with edit access to a Project can generate a summary. Advanced summary templates are available on paid plans. Summary translation is available on the Enterprise plan.

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Overview

Save time identifying key themes in calls, interviews, and documents with data summaries, powered by the latest version of Claude. When importing files into a project, we can automatically generate a summary of all text content to your preferred structure.

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Before you begin

• Edit access to the Project containing the note or data object
• Enough content in the note to summarize
• The note isn’t in read-only mode
• Advanced summary frameworks require a paid plan. Please review the table below.
• Translation requires an Enterprise plan

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Generate a summary

1. Open the note or data object in your Project.
2. Click the Summary tab in the right sidebar.
3. Click Summarize. Dovetail uses By topics by default.
4. To try a different template, open the template dropdown at the top of the summary, choose a template, and click Regenerate.

Summarization runs in the background, so you can navigate away or close the tab — the summary is added once it’s ready.

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Available summary frameworks

There are different frameworks that you can select from to tailor your data summary output.

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Review and act on a summary

Each summary card has action buttons for Share, Feedback, Copy text, and Regenerate. Individual paragraphs offer Edit summary, Copy text, and Delete from their overflow menu.

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Citations

Summaries reference the passages they were generated from:

• For notes and transcripts, clicking a citation number scrolls to the quoted passage in the source content.
• For audio and video files that have a transcript, the summary is broken into timestamped sections. Click a section to jump to that point in the recording.

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Change the summary language

You can translate any data summary from one language to another. You need edit access to the Project, and the note can’t be in read-only mode.

1. In the Summary tab, click Change language in the summary header.
2. Choose a language from the list.

Changing the language re-summarizes the note and saves the new summary for everyone with access to the Project — it isn’t a per-viewer setting.

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Auto-generate summaries when importing files

You can set a default template on a Project so that Dovetail automatically summarizes each file as it’s imported.

1. Open your project.
2. Click the ••• (more options) menu in the top-right corner.
3. Select Automation.

From here, you can configure: Summary framework. New files added to the Project after the automation is enabled are summarized automatically in the background.

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Troubleshooting

The Summarize button is disabled. The Summary tab shows a specific reason for each case:

• Viewers cannot generate summaries — you’re on the Viewer role in this workspace. Ask a Workspace admin to change your role.
• You don’t have edit permissions in this project — ask a Project admin or the owner to grant you edit access.
• Not enough content to summarize — the note doesn’t have enough text yet. Add more content and try again.
• Summarization is disabled for this workspace — a Workspace admin has turned off summarization for the workspace.

Some summary frameworks aren’t showing up in the dropdown. The advanced groups (Product design, Sales, Customer success, Academic) are only available on paid plans. Chronological only appears when the note contains a transcript. Change language isn’t available. Translation requires an Enterprise plan. Summarizing a PDF returns an error. When you import a PDF, Dovetail needs to finish processing the file before a summary can be generated. If you click Summarize before processing is complete, you may see an error. Wait for the toast confirming the file has been processed, then click Summarize. The summary hasn’t appeared yet. Summarization runs in the background. Refresh the note after a few moments — you don’t need to keep the tab open.

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FAQs