Chat With AI to Summarise Obnoxiously Long PDFs

AI is great at summarizing text, which can save you a lot of time you would’ve spent reading. But we can do better: Rather than receive a simple summary of any given text, what if we could chat with the AI about it, answering specific questions and diving deeper into the material? It just so happens we have such a solution in ChatPDF.

ChatPDF is a tool that turns your PDF into the knowledge base for a ChatGPT kind of interface. Imagine booting up ChatGPT, but the only thing it knows about is your company’s Q1 report, or the history document you need to read for class. Rather than ask the AI to fix up your resume, or write you a thank you note, you can ask it specific questions about your document, like “Which goals did we meet this quarter?” or “What was the significance of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe?”

According to the website, “ChatPDF creates a semantic index over all paragraphs of the PDF. When answering a question, ChatPDF finds the most relevant paragraphs from the PDF and uses the ChatGPT API from OpenAI to generate an answer.” All that means is 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 upload your PDF. (The site says that data is stored securely, and you can manually delete a file anytime, which we recommend you do.) After a couple of seconds, you see a ChatGPT-like interface appear for the PDF. It starts off 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 of your own.

For example, if you drop a PDF of the U.S. Constitution in ChatPDF, it’ll offer a brief summary: “Welcome to the helpful PDF file on the Constitution of the United States! This document outlines the fundamental principles and structure of the US government, including the separation of powers and the rights of citizens,” plus some example questions:

• What is the purpose of the Constitution?
• How is Congress structured according to the Constitution?
• What are the qualifications for being a member of the House of Representatives?

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

The website’s free plan is generous. You can upload PDFs of up to 120 pages, and are free to ask 50 questions per day. A $US5 ($7) per month plan will bump you up to 1,000 questions per day, and 2,000-page PDFs.

Bing lets you chat with your PDFs, too

If you’re a fan of Microsoft’s Edge browser, you might want to try Bing’s version of ChatPDF. After opening a PDF or any long document, click the Bing button to open the Chat interface. Here, you can ask it questions regarding the PDF. As this is Bing, it integrates web search results as well, with source links.

This is very cool: it has become a lot easier to read academic research.

If you open a paper in Microsoft Edge (I know, I know), the Bing AI sidebar can read the PDF and you can ask it questions about the paper. (I checked & the results seem high-quality, but be careful with AI) pic.twitter.com/MA4fKECBSS

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) April 17, 2023

This feature is currently rolling out slowly, and is in constant development. But according to multiple Twitter users, the feature is live, and working well (similar to ChatPDF, it’s able to analyse the entire PDF document, and not just parts of it).

As with all AI tools, however, these PDF chatbots are prone to error. Don’t rely on them blindly for work or school: They can be helpful tools, but it’s worth fact-checking these answers before taking them seriously.