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 PDFGPT.

What is PDFGPT?

PDFGPT 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 “What is the importance of establishing an effective venture capital mechanism in implementing?” or “What was the significance of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe?” — sounds great right? So let’s dive deeper.

How does even it work?

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

Getting Started

Alright, I think at this stage you have a solid knowledge of what PDFGPT is and what is capable of, so let’s give it a try.

One of the best things about PDFGPT is that you don’t need an account to get started. Simply open the site here and upload your PDF — get your OpenAI API KEY BTW. After a few seconds, a ChatGPT-like interface will 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. I attached an image below of the document that I was working with lately.

The website’s free version is quite generous and impressive. You can upload PDFs of up to 1000 pages. If you need more, you can contact them or ask a question in the Discord community right here.

Bing’s Version of PDFGPT

If you’re a fan of Microsoft’s Edge browser, you might want to try Bing’s version of PDFGPT. 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 — voila.

The Bottom Line

While AI tools like PDFGPT and Bing’s version of PDFGPT can be helpful, they are not foolproof. It’s worth fact-checking these answers before taking them seriously, especially when it comes to important work or school projects.

That said, PDFGPT is a powerful tool and it gets the job done, it can save you a lot of time and effort when dealing with large PDF documents. So why not give it a try and see how it can help you? As always thank you for reading!

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Originally published on Medium.