PDF chat tools are AI-powered tools that enable you to upload PDFs, ask questions, and get answers related to their content. I wish these tools were around when I was doing my PhD, they would have saved me so much time and effort. Imagine doing a literature review and having to go through dozens of research studies and academic papers. These tools would facilitate the whole process and make it to so much efficient.
In this post, I share with you four of my favorite AI PDF chat tools that will enable you to interact with your PDFs in more effective ways. And before we explore this collection, let me share this caveat.
Always make sure to double check content generated by AI. I highly recommend that you do a first reading of the paper yourself then upload it to AI to interact with it. In this way you will have a better understanding of the document’s context and be able to verify the AI’s insights more effectively.
AI Tools to Chat with PDFs
Here are our top picks for AI tools to chat with PDFs:
1. AI Chatbots
Currently, most of the AI chatbots support the option to upload files and process their content for insights. I use this feature in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity AI and it works perfectly fine. You can upload a PDF and get the bot the help you extract key information, answer specific questions, provide citations, provide document summaries, and many more.
2. Elicit
Elicit is an excellent AI research tool which also includes this feature that allows you to add multiple PDF documents and synthesize insights from them. You can use Elicit to extract key points from your uploaded PDFs, compare information across multiple papers, organize your findings, and generate comprehensive summaries.
3. NotebookLM
NotebookLM is another powerful AI tool that enables you to upload PDFs or other documents and engage with the content by asking questions, generating summaries, or extracting key points. One of the unique features provided by NotebookLM which I did not find in any other AI tool so far is audio feature which allows you to generate audio podcasts hosted by two AI agents.
These podcasts provide summaries, insights, and detailed discussion of the content of the uploaded papers. You can even participate in the discussion. This is an excellent feature to digest and engage with the content of papers while multitasking or on the go.
4. SciSummary
SciSummary is an AI tool geared towards research papers. It helps you instantly generate summaries for research articles and academic papers. You can upload your document or PDF, or provide its URL, and SciSummary will provide a concise summary of the paper. You can further paraphrase the summary or ask for more explanations.
You can also use the chat feature to ask questions about the PDF, generate explanations of figures and tables in the document, and more. SciSummary offers both a free and a premium plan. The free plan is limited and only offers summaries of up to 10,000 words and does not support the chat feature.
5. ChatPDF
ChatPDF is another powerful AI tool that enables you to upload PDFs and ask questions. You can interact with PDFs in any language, ask questions, and get insights with references to the source in the original document. You can even upload multiple PDFs and chat with them in one single conversation.
As soon as you upload a PDF to ChatPDF, a quick summary of the PDF is generated along with sample questions about its content. You can use the preloaded questions or come up with your own. You can also organize your documents and PDFs into folders for easy navigation.
6. ChatDOC
ChatDOC is somewhat similar to ChatPDF. You can use it to generate instant summaries of PDFs and documents, find key insights within documents, and generate explanations for complex topics. ChatDOC also offers an OCR feature which makes it easy for the chatbot to read image-coded PDFs.
The way it works is simple: upload your PDF or document and use the chat pane on the right-hand side to ask your questions. You can also select any paragraph from your document and click to ask questions about it. At the bottom of the chat window, there is the option to change the output language.
ChatDOC also offers a browser extension that works in Chrome. Please note, the OCR functionality is limited to premium subscribers. As a free user, you are limited to 20 pages per PDF, 20 questions, 30 files/collection, and 2 files/24 hours.
7. SciSpace
SciSpace (Typeset) is an AI research tool that offers a wide collection of functionalities geared towards researchers and academics. These features include literature review, PDF chat, paraphrase, citation generator, AI detector, and more. Simply upload your PDF to SciSpace and click to generate a summary of it, then ask questions to get answers with citations.
PDF chat in SciSpace is powered by Copilot. You can write your questions and let Copilot find answers from the paper or you can select a statement from the PDF and ask Copilot to explain it. There are various ways you can use the PDF Chat feature in SciSpace, including getting related papers, data used, methods used, and more.
Final thoughts
I hope you have found this overview of AI PDF chat tools helpful. These tools have the potential to transform the way we interact with academic papers and research documents, making the process much more efficient and less daunting. Go ahead, give them a try and share with us your feedback on our social media profiles.
