diff --git a/spacy/tokens/doc.pyx b/spacy/tokens/doc.pyx
index 4900a363d..df6a17521 100644
--- a/spacy/tokens/doc.pyx
+++ b/spacy/tokens/doc.pyx
@@ -508,13 +508,18 @@ cdef class Doc:
                 yield from self.user_hooks['sents'](self)
                 return
 
-            if not self.is_parsed:
-                raise ValueError(
-                    "Sentence boundary detection requires the dependency "
-                    "parse, which requires a statistical model to be "
-                    "installed and loaded. For more info, see the "
-                    "documentation: \n%s\n" % about.__docs_models__)
             cdef int i
+            if not self.is_parsed:
+                for i in range(1, self.length):
+                    if self.c[i].sent_start != 0:
+                        break
+                else:
+                    raise ValueError(
+                        "Sentence boundaries unset. You can add the 'sentencizer' "
+                        "component to the pipeline with: "
+                        "nlp.add_pipe(nlp.create_pipe('sentencizer')) "
+                        "Alternatively, add the dependency parser, or set "
+                        "sentence boundaries by setting doc[i].sent_start")
             start = 0
             for i in range(1, self.length):
                 if self.c[i].sent_start == 1: