Best AI Tools for PDF
Did you know that you can chat with your PDF documents?
Instead of searching through them, you can upload them to an AI service and ask questions related to the content of those files. That is much faster than searching and you will also get meaningful answers you can use in some other document, for instance.
Modern AI algorithms can understand text and provide answers to your questions. It’s like ChatGPT but for PDF files.
This can come in very handy for companies that have a ton of knowledge stored in PDFs on various hard drives and in the cloud. Now, they can make use of all those files and extract knowledge when they need it. Here are the best AI tools for this purpose.
ChatPDF by Mathis Lichtenberger und Moritz Lage GbR
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Very useful for making sense of PDFs
- Students love it as they get to chat with their textbooks
- And so do professionals who have to go through large documents
- Some people reporting inconsistent results
ChatPDF is an online tool that enables users to interact with their PDF documents as if they were a human. Powered by ChatGPT, it analyzes the PDF file to create a semantic index, then presents the relevant paragraphs to a text-generation AI.
So, when you ask a question – the AI will use relevant paragraphs to give you an answer.
ChatPDF can be used to quickly extract information from large PDF files, such as manuals, essays, contracts, books, and research papers. In case you wonder, this extracted data is stored in a secure cloud storage and deleted after 7 days.
The tool could efficiently analyze documents, from financial and sales reports to project and business proposals, training manuals, and legal contracts. It is also a helpful tool for students and other members of the academia.
Also worth noting is that ChatPDF can read PDFs and answer questions in any language. You can upload a PDF in one language and ask questions in another. The greeting message will be in the language of the PDF file, and after that, ChatPDF will answer in the language you ask.
ChatPDF is free for up to 3 PDFs per day, each up to 120 pages. If you need more, you can upgrade to the ChatPDF Plus plan.
AskYourPdf
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Finally, you can make sense of all those PDFs on your hard drive
- Chrome extension is a true time-saver
- And the same goes for the mobile app
- There are more affordable options out there
AskYourPDF claims to be the “only PDF AI Chat App you will ever need.” As that’s the case with other such services, it allows users to upload their PDF files and engage with them through a chat-based interface to extract valuable insights and answers from their documents.
Or you can take a shortcut and use AskYourPDF’s Chrome extension to do the same thing right from your browser.
In addition, AskYourPDF also offers a mobile app, so you can accomplish the same thing while on the go, as well as a ChatGPT plugin for those who got used to OpenAI’s interface.
Finally, there is the API, which enables developers to integrate chat with PDF capabilities into their apps and services.
To sum it up, with AskYourPDF, instead of scrolling through and “just reading” your documents – you can make them interactive and engaging. Just ask, and you shall be served with an answer.
ChatDOC
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Support for multiple file formats, not just PDFs
- The ability to query multiple documents at once can be very handy
- Provided citations are essential for researchers
- The free plan is very limited
ChatDOC is a ChatGPT-based file-reading assistant that can quickly extract, locate, and summarize information from documents. It can understand texts, tables, and images — and return highlights that matter.
What makes it different (better) than competing tools is its ability to go beyond PDF files, as it can also sing along .doc, .docx, .md, .epub, and .txt files — as well as websites and scanned files. Yes, it comes with a built-in OCR that will detect and read text on the image to return the summary.
Furthermore, and as mentioned above, it can understand tables — allowing you to select it and ask for analysis. Also, you can select partial text from the document and start the conversation about it to get more information on the subject at hand.
In addition, every response ChatDOC provides will come with a citation so that you know where in the document the information comes from. This makes it very useful for researchers who need to precisely cite all of their sources.
Finally, it’s worth adding that ChatDOC can make queries across multiple documents — which is another handy feature for researchers and students alike.
Humata by Tilda Technologies Inc.
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Probably the best "chat with PDF" app
- Especially great for teams
- The free plan isn't that bad
- There are other options out there, some of which may be more affordable for you (depending on what you need)
Humata AI is like ChatGPT for all your files — because “asking is faster than skimming.” It lets you chat your way through long documents and use AI to summarize for you.
The tool is made for both individuals and organizations, allowing them to easily extract insights and answers from a single or multiple PDFs simultaneously. Ultimately, it helps users streamline the process of knowledge discovery.
Unlike other services that let you chat with your documents, Humata is made for teams from the ground up. It lets multiple users access the same or different files, with each having the same experience.
It is also a highly secure service, encrypting and storing your files in a secure private cloud with support for role-based security. Not everyone needs access to all files and folders, and Humata is ready to accommodate that request.
The tool can be tried for free, and as they say, it is cheap to scale for companies.
What can AI tools for PDFs do for you?
Generally speaking, they can extract information when you need it – and all you have to do is ask rather than search. Here are the key features:
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Chat with your PDFs
Instead of searching through a PDF file, you can upload it to an AI-powered service and then ask questions about it. The algorithm powering the services will understand the context of the text and generate appropriate responses, making it easier to go through complex documents.
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Create your knowledge base
Upload all your PDFs to the AI tool that can handle them and then use it as your knowledge base. Suddenly, all those documents make sense, with the AI providing you with information related to them whenever needed.
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Summarization
Don’t want to go through a thousand-page-long PDF? There are smart tools out there that will make all that content shorter and easier to understand by producing concise and coherent summaries.
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Paraphrasing
Or you may want to create a new PDF out of an existing one, but you want it to sound differently. That is also possible with modern AI tools that will help you rephrase documents to make them sound more professional or however you want them to sound.
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Translations
Finally, there are tools that will translate PDFs for you. And these are some rock-solid, AI-powered translations that you can almost use out of the box. It is always better to double-check the translation, but you will definitely get a solid starting point.
AI tools for PDFs have been growing in popularity in recent months and there is a reason for that. Many of us have been collecting various ebooks and reports for years and these files are just sitting idle on our hard drives or in the cloud. These AI tools actually make all those documents actionable, allowing us to extract information when we need it – and that’s a powerful proposition.