Last updated 2026-04-24 · 2 min read

What Gist works on

Articles, papers, documents (PDF, DOCX, and more), YouTube, audio/video uploads, and pasted text are first-class. Google Docs and X/Twitter are best-effort.

Articles. Papers. Documents. YouTube. Pasted text. These are first-class.

Google Docs and X/Twitter are best-effort. Everything else, Gist tells you up front that this is not a candidate page.

First-class

These are the paths we tune for. Expect strong results on the happy path.

  • Regular web articles — blog posts, newsletters, news pieces, essays.
  • Academic papers — arXiv is the reference example. The layered read maps well to the abstract → methods → discussion → limitations structure.
  • Local documents — upload directly on /try or the homepage. Supported formats: PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, HTML, CSV, TXT, Markdown, AsciiDoc, LaTeX, and XML. Quality tracks the document's own readability; a clean text-layer document works well, a scanned image less so.
  • YouTube videos — the layered read works from the video's transcript when it has one, and falls back to the title and description when it does not. Works well for talks, lectures, interviews, explainers.
  • Audio and video uploads — upload an audio or video file (up to 9.5 hours) on /try and Gist transcribes the speech, then reads it. No captions or existing transcript needed.
  • Pasted text — drop raw text into /try and you get the same layered read without any extension step.

Best-effort

These work when the source is clean. They are not the main path.

  • Google Docs — readable, link-viewable docs work; permission-gated or heavily-formatted docs often do not. See Google Docs not working.
  • X / Twitter status pages — individual threads and status URLs work; timelines and composite views do not.

What Gist does not do today

  • News homepages, timelines, composite index pages. No coherent piece to Gist.
  • Paywalled content we cannot access.
  • Silent or near-silent video with nothing readable on screen — no speech to transcribe, nothing to read.
  • Raster image-only files (JPEG, PNG, GIF). Use a PDF or text export instead.

Where /try fits in

/try is the paste-and-upload web surface. It accepts any URL, any local document, or raw pasted text. Use it when the extension is not the right tool — a local file not open in a tab, a snippet of text without a URL, or a device where Gist is not installed.

What is next

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