PnP Modern Search is a powerful SharePoint search solution that can be supercharged with AI summaries – enabling results to explain their relevance before you even open the document. This guide examines the advantages of incorporating AI-generated summaries into PnP Modern Search and offers a detailed step-by-step plan for implementing this enhancement.
Why PnP Modern Search needs AI summaries
PnP Modern Search already improves SharePoint’s native search experience, but even with these enhancements, results usually show only titles and brief snippets. Users often have to open multiple documents to find the information they need – a significant time drain (studies show that employees spend up to 20–30% of their work time searching).
AI-generated summaries tackle this problem by explaining how each search result relates to your query. This lets you skip irrelevant results and focus on the useful ones. For instance, a summary might reveal that a document only mentions your keyword in passing or that it thoroughly covers your topic. You can even hover over a result to see key sentences with your search terms in context, helping users find the correct information faster.
PointFire Search Summarizer: AI for PnP Modern Search
PointFire Search Summarizer is an SPFx extension that brings relevance-based AI summaries to PnP Modern Search. Every search result gets a concise overview of what the document says about your query. It uses advanced natural language processing to extract relevant insights from large documents.
Key features include:
- Customizable summaries and key sentences: Configure the summary length and enable users to hover over relevant sentences in context.
- Handles large documents: Summarizes long files without losing important context.
- Multilingual support: Works across languages – the query, content, and interface can all be in different languages.
How to Implement AI Summaries in PnP Modern Search
Implementing the Search Summarizer is straightforward. Follow these steps to supercharge your SharePoint search:
- Install PnP Modern Search
- Set up Azure OpenAI: Create an Azure OpenAI resource in your Azure subscription and note its endpoint URL and API key.
- Add the Summarizer app: Install the PointFire Search Summarizer from Microsoft AppSource or upload it to your SharePoint app catalog.
- Enable and Configure the Summarizer: First, enable the extension in the PnP Search Results web part by adding the PointFire Search Summarizer component to the web part’s Extensibility Library.
Next, configure the Summarizer by entering your Azure OpenAI endpoint and key in the web part’s settings. You can then adjust options like summary length as needed.
Combining PnP Modern Search with AI summaries truly supercharges your SharePoint search results. With the PointFire Search Summarizer in place, your team will spend less time digging through documents and more time using the information that matters. This enhancement seamlessly integrates into your SharePoint environment, respecting permissions and multilingual content, making it a straightforward upgrade that leads to faster discovery and a significantly improved search experience.
