How ChatGPT Can Help You Do More With PDFs

The AI chatbot can search, summarize, and create PDF documents with a few handy plug-ins.

The generative AI bot ChatGPT has been busy helping writers, debating issues, generating code, and more—and now that developer OpenAI has opened the door to third-party plug-ins, a ton of new functionality is available.

These plug-ins can look up information on the web, draw diagrams, manage travel plans, interrogate Wikipedia, and more. To access the various plug-ins, you need an active, $20-per-month subscription to ChatGPT Plus. Here we'll focus on one particular type of extension: PDF plug-ins.

ChatGPT and these plug-ins can help you search through, summarize, and search these files in seconds. To access plug-ins, start a new chat in the ChatGPT interface and select GPT-4, then Plug-Ins from the options at the top. Click the small icon underneath the header, which lists currently installed plug-ins, then scroll down to Plug-In Store to find new ones.

Ai PDF

Ai PDF can upload documents to the cloud if needed.

 Ai PDF via David Nield

Ai PDF promises “super-fast, interactive chats,” and all you need to do to get its assistance is to give ChatGPT the URL of a PDF on the web. If that's not possible, the plug-in comes with a PDF upload option, so you can review documents stored on your computer too.

From there it's simply a question of letting the plug-in analyze the PDF you've provided and then asking ChatGPT questions about it—its premise, its conclusions, or specific pieces of information. You can even ask about the style the PDF is written in or the details that it omits.

One of the features we like about Ai PDF is that it refers to pages in the PDF when doing summaries and answering questions, so you can double-check that the plug-in is working properly. You can also ask ChatGPT for individual lines from the document to back up its answers.

AskYourPDF

The name of this plug-in shows you the sort of natural, conversational relationship it wants to facilitate between you and your PDFs—and it says it'll “unlock the power of your PDFs” by giving ChatGPT access to any PDF you give it.

If your PDFs aren't hosted online, then AskYourPDF can upload them for you, and you can then submit queries through ChatGPT. You can ask for specific details from specific sections, get overviews and summaries, get certain sections rewritten, and generally do anything ChatGPT can do with standard blocks of text.

The plug-in also responds well to follow-up questions, if you need clarification on something that's been said previously, or need to know where in a PDF document a response was sourced from.

Doc Maker

A lesson plan is one kind of document that Doc Maker can produce.

 Doc Maker via David Nield

Doc Maker offers something a bit different, in that it is focused more on making PDFs than querying them. There's no shortage of tools for this job, of course, but the extra twist of using ChatGPT as part of the process can be helpful in a variety of ways.

Here's how it works: You specify the type of PDF you want to create, and Doc Maker helps you make it, with ChatGPT's assistance. Maybe you want to put together a résumé, or you need to compile a financial report, or you've got a newsletter to finish. The plug-in will prompt you for the text it needs, or you can generate it using AI.

Say you have meeting minutes to write up, for example—give Doc Maker and ChatGPT access to the text and you can have a summary in PDF format in just a few seconds. You've got all the text-generating capabilities of ChatGPT, but also with an easy way to get that text into a shareable, standard format.

ScholarAI

If scientific papers are the PDFs that you spend most of your time with, then ScholarAI is going to be a ChatGPT plug-in of particular interest. It gives you access to more than 40 million peer-reviewed papers in PDF form from across the web, and you can query them individually or search through the database in its entirety.

For example, you might want to start by looking for papers on a particular topic that have been published this year, or in any specific range of years. Then, you could get ScholarAI to look at specific aspects of one particular paper—summarizing sections, asking about the methods used in the experiments, and so on. At the same time, ChatGPT can pull in more background knowledge that's not in the paper.

ScholarAI has been built to try to minimize the number of false hallucinations ChatGPT has, and to back up its answers with solid research. You can get the plug-in to link back to the paper on the web, and to quote specific lines from it, in order to double-check the answers that you're being given.

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