Chat With AI to Summarize Horrendously Long PDFs

AI is great at summarizing text , which can save you a lot of time that you would have spent reading. But we can do better: instead of getting a simple summary of any given text, what if we could talk to the AI ​​about it, answering specific questions and delving into the material? It just so happens that we have such a solution in ChatPDF .

ChatPDF is a tool that turns your PDF file into a knowledge base for an interface like ChatGPT. Imagine that ChatGPT is loading, but the only thing it knows about is your company’s Q1 report or historical document that you need to read in class. Instead of asking the AI ​​to fix your resume or write you a thank you note, you can ask it specific questions about your document, such as “What goals did we achieve this quarter?” or “What was the significance of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe?”

According to the website, “ChatPDF creates a semantic index for all PDF paragraphs. When answering a question, ChatPDF finds the most relevant paragraphs from the PDF file and uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT API to generate the answer.” All of this means that ChatPDF has found a clever workaround for ChatGPT’s own inability to deal with large documents.

You don’t even need an account to get started: open the site and download the PDF. (The site says the data is kept secure, and you can manually delete the file at any time, which we recommend you do.) After a couple of seconds, you’ll see a ChatGPT-like interface for PDF. It starts by telling you what the PDF is about and offers some initial questions to get the ball rolling. Feel free to use these suggestions or start asking questions yourself.

For example, if you drag and drop a US Constitution PDF into ChatPDF, it will offer a summary: “Welcome to the helpful United States Constitution PDF! This document outlines the fundamental principles and structure of the US government, including the separation of powers and the rights of citizens,” as well as several sample questions:

• What is the purpose of the Constitution?
• How is the Congress organized according to the Constitution?
• What are the requirements for membership in the House of Representatives?

When you’re done, I suggest you use the Export Chat option to download the chat as a text file. Then use the Delete button to remove both the conversation and the PDF from the site’s storage.

The free site plan is generous. You can upload PDFs up to 120 pages and ask 50 questions a day for free. The $5/month plan will allow you to receive up to 1,000 questions per day and 2,000 page PDFs.

Bing also lets you communicate with your PDFs

If you’re a fan of the Microsoft Edge browser, you can try Bing’s version of ChatPDF. After opening a PDF file or any long document, press the Bing button to open the chat interface. Here you can ask him questions regarding PDF. Because it’s Bing, it also combines web search results with links to sources.

This feature is currently being rolled out slowly and is under constant development. But according to several Twitter users, the feature works and works well (similar to ChatPDF, it is able to parse the entire PDF document , not just parts of it).

However, like all AI tools, these PDF chatbots are error prone. Don’t blindly rely on them at work or school: they can be useful tools, but it’s worth checking out these answers before taking them seriously.