Please note: This feature is available for subscription licenses and student licenses and requires that you have a free MAXQDA account and have signed up for the AI Assist beta program. For more information on AI
Assist, please see here.
Using AI Assist, you can automatically summarize the contents of a coded text segment. The summary is saved in the comment of the coded segment.
Calling the function in the “Document Browser”
To create a summary of a coded segment in the “Document Browser:”
- Right-click the vertical coding stripe or the code name next to the stripe and select AI Assist: Summarize Segment in the context menu.
- In the dialog that appears, specify the desired language for the summary. AI Assist automatically detects the language of the coded segment and translates the contents into the desired language of the summary, if necessary.
- In the dialog, you can also choose the type of summary:
Sentences – generates short concise statements.
Topic list – lists the topics occurring in the segment’s text. Usually, the topics are separated by commas, but sometimes bullet points are presented.
After clicking OK, the summary is automatically created and recorded in the comment of the coded segment. In the comment window, you can adjust the summary as needed. Comments created with AI Assist start with the abbreviation “AI:.” You can remove this prefix from the comment at any time.
Please note:
- If a comment already exists for the coded segment, you will be asked whether you want to overwrite the existing comment.
- Comments for coded segments are limited to 255 characters in MAXQDA. AI Assist tries to create a summary that does not exceed this limit, but it can happen, especially with very long coded segments, that the results are truncated. In this case, the automatically created summary ends with three dots “...” to indicate the truncation.
- It is not possible to summarize coded segments shorter than 20 and longer than 5,000 characters.
Calling the function at other places in MAXQDA
The AI Assist: Summarize Segment function is not only available in the “Document Browser,” but also at locations in MAXQDA where coded segments are listed:
- In the tabular Overview of Coded Segments, start the function by right-clicking on an individual row.
- In the “Retrieved Segments” window, start the function by right-clicking on the coding stripe.
- In the Interactive Quote Matrix, start the function by right-clicking on a displayed segment; the same applies to the Compare Codes function.
Please note:
- AI Assist provides very good results for very many use cases. Nevertheless, it is important that you check the results.
- If you analyze texts with critical content (violence, hate speech, bullying, etc.), summaries may not be created.
- Usually, you will receive the same or very similar summary for the same segments. However, it may happen that a summary is different from previous ones because the generative language model used provides dynamic results and because AI Assist is continuously optimized.
See also the frequently asked questions on AI Assist.
