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Pipeline tutorial, summarization doesn't work

Hugging Face Forums [Unofficial] March 31, 2026
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I’m doing a HF tutorial on transformers at Transformers, what can they do? · Hugging Face. It uses a Colab notebook at Google Colab . When I try to run the code for a summarizer, which begins with this:

from transformers import pipeline

summarizer = pipeline("summarization")

I get an error

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
KeyError                                  Traceback (most recent call last)
/tmp/ipykernel_13970/3730791013.py in <cell line: 0>()
      1 from transformers import pipeline
      2
----> 3 summarizer = pipeline("summarization")
      4 summarizer(
      5     """

2 frames/usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/transformers/pipelines/__init__.py in pipeline(task, model, config, tokenizer, feature_extractor, image_processor, processor, revision, use_fast, token, device, device_map, dtype, trust_remote_code, model_kwargs, pipeline_class, **kwargs)
    775             )
    776     else:
--> 777         normalized_task, targeted_task, task_options = check_task(task)
    778         if pipeline_class is None:
    779             pipeline_class = targeted_task["impl"]

/usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/transformers/pipelines/__init__.py in check_task(task)
    379
    380     """
--> 381     return PIPELINE_REGISTRY.check_task(task)
    382
    383

/usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/transformers/pipelines/base.py in check_task(self, task)
   1354             raise KeyError(f"Invalid translation task {task}, use 'translation_XX_to_YY' format")
   1355
-> 1356         raise KeyError(
   1357             f"Unknown task {task}, available tasks are {self.get_supported_tasks() + ['translation_XX_to_YY']}"
   1358         )

KeyError: "Unknown task summarization, available tasks are ['any-to-any', 'audio-classification', 'automatic-speech-recognition', 'depth-estimation', 'document-question-answering', 'feature-extraction', 'fill-mask', 'image-classification', 'image-feature-extraction', 'image-segmentation', 'image-text-to-text', 'image-to-image', 'keypoint-matching', 'mask-generation', 'ner', 'object-detection', 'question-answering', 'sentiment-analysis', 'table-question-answering', 'text-classification', 'text-generation', 'text-to-audio', 'text-to-speech', 'token-classification', 'video-classification', 'visual-question-answering', 'vqa', 'zero-shot-audio-classification', 'zero-shot-classification', 'zero-shot-image-classification', 'zero-shot-object-detection', 'translation_XX_to_YY']"

The pipeline no longer supports “summarization”. Is there a way to get this to work. I’m mainly curious. It appears the pipeline module may have been updated but the Colab notebook was not.

Thanks!

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