A summary of a document is generated in near real time. In aspects, an indication to summarize the document is received and the document is processed to generate a summary. For instance, processing includes extracting sentences from the document and generating a plurality of candidate passages from the extracted sentences. Features are extracted from each of the plurality of candidate passages and each candidate passage is ranked based at least in part on the extracted features. High-ranking candidate passages are considered likely to be important and/or representative of the document. A summary of the document is generated including one or more of the high-ranking candidate passages. The summary includes portions of the document that are considered important and/or representative of the document, so a user may review the summary in lieu of reading the entire document.