OpenClaw Summarize Skill: Condense Any Content in Seconds

Every information-heavy workflow hits the same wall: too much text, not enough time. OpenClaw's summarize skill condenses documents, web content, and conversation threads into the exact format you need — brief bullets, structured JSON, or a paragraph summary — in one skill call. Here's how to configure it properly.

What the Summarize Skill Does

The summarize skill is a core built-in that ships with every OpenClaw install. It takes text input from any source — a previous skill's output, a file, a URL fetch result — and returns a condensed version in your chosen format.

Three things make it more useful than calling a summarization API directly:

• Automatic chunking — documents longer than the model's context window are split and recursively summarised without you writing any chunking logic
• Format control — output as plain text, markdown, or structured JSON with fields you define
• Skill chaining — outputs pipe directly into other skills like Notion sync, email compose, or Slack post

Configuring the Skill

Enable the summarize skill in your OpenClaw skills config:

skills:
  summarize:
    enabled: true
    default_style: standard
    max_tokens: 300
    output_format: text  # text | markdown | json
    json_fields:
      - headline
      - bullets
      - key_entities
    language: en
    strip_html: true

The strip_html option automatically removes HTML tags before summarising — useful when piping web fetch results directly into the skill without a pre-processing step.

Summary Modes

OpenClaw's summarize skill ships with three style presets. Pick the one that matches your use case and override max_tokens if needed.

• brief — 1-2 sentences, good for notification summaries and log entries
• standard — 1 paragraph (~150 words), the default for most use cases
• detailed — 3-5 paragraphs, preserves more nuance for research workflows

You can override the style per-call in your skill workflow:

actions:
  - skill: summarize
    input: "{{fetch.content}}"
    style: brief
    output_format: json

The detailed mode uses more model tokens, which matters if you're running on a local model with a limited context window. On hosted models it's negligible.

Chaining with Other Skills

The summarize skill becomes most powerful when chained. The most common pattern is web-search → summarize → store:

skills:
  daily_briefing:
    trigger: cron(0 7 * * *)
    actions:
      - skill: web_search
        query: "OpenClaw AI agent news"
        results: 5
      - skill: summarize
        input: "{{web_search.results}}"
        style: brief
        output_format: json
      - skill: notion_append
        database: "Daily Briefings"
        data: "{{summarize.output}}"

This three-step workflow runs every morning, searches for relevant news, condenses each result, and logs it to Notion. The whole thing runs without any human in the loop.

Common Mistakes

Not specifying a style preset and using the default is fine for testing, but produces inconsistent output lengths in production. Always set your preferred style explicitly.

• Piping unsupported formats — binary files, spreadsheets, and images need pre-processing before the summarize skill can handle them. Use an OCR or parser skill first.
• Setting max_tokens too low — values below 50 often produce cut-off summaries. Brief style needs at least 60 tokens to produce a complete sentence.
• Ignoring language setting — the skill defaults to English. For multilingual content, set the language parameter to match the input language.
• Not testing chunking behaviour — if your workflow regularly processes long documents, test with a document that exceeds the context window to confirm chunking works as expected.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the summarize skill built into OpenClaw?
Yes. It ships with the base OpenClaw install and requires no additional packages. Enable it in your skills config and it's ready to use.

What content types can the summarize skill handle?
Plain text, markdown, HTML (auto-stripped), PDF text content, and conversation history. Binary files and images require a separate skill first.

How do I control summary length?
Set the max_tokens or target_length parameter, or use style presets: 'brief' (1-2 sentences), 'standard' (1 paragraph), 'detailed' (3-5 paragraphs).

Can the summarize skill output structured data?
Yes. Set output_format to 'json' and specify fields like 'headline', 'bullets', 'key_entities'. The skill returns a structured JSON object instead of plain text.

Does summarize work on long documents?
For documents exceeding the model context window, OpenClaw uses recursive chunking — summarising each chunk then summarising the summaries automatically.

Can I chain summarize with the web search skill?
Yes. A common pattern: web-search returns results, summarize condenses each one, then a compose skill combines them into a briefing document.