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 samed me so much time and effort. Image doing a literature review and having to go through dozens of research studies and academic papers..
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. Whether you’re a researcher, student, or professional, these AI-powered tools will make handling academic papers and research studies much easier.
AI Tools to Chat with PDFs
Here are our top picks for AI tools to chat with PDFs:
1. 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. There is a seven-day free trial to experiment with the premium plan if you want. The premium plan starts at $6.99 per month.
2. 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. ChatPDF’s free plan is limited. The plus plan ($12 per month) offers more features including unlimited PDFs, unlimited questions, 2,000 pages/PDF, 50 PDFs/folder, and much more.
3. 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. The pro version offers a wide variety of features including formula recognition, OCR, unlimited PDF pages, 300 questions/24 hours, 300 files/month, and more.
4. 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. Whether you’re conducting a literature review, preparing for a presentation, or simply trying to grasp complex concepts, these tools can save you valuable time and effort.
