Chat with PDF

Chat with PDF - summarize, ask questions, translate, and more for FREE

Thirty years after its creation, the PDF remains one of the most popular formats to share and capture important information - in fact, there are over 2.5 trillion PDFs in circulation. Although they retain their popularity, this relatively static document format is beginning to show its age, especially now, with more interactive and collaborative tools available to us.
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But that’s where AI comes in.

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AI unlocks the ability to have a conversation with your PDF so that you can summarize its contents, ask for clarification, and extract key information with simple prompts.

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Top tools to chat with PDF

1. Popform

If you’re filling out PDF forms there’s no better tool on the market than Popform - of course we’re a little bias.

Popform is the first PDF form filling application with AI features, including Chat with PDF, built in to make life easier and take on the pesky challenges of adulting.

First and foremost, chat with PDF is built right into the form filling screen. Whenever you’re sent a tax document, lease agreement, employment offer, NDA or any other complicated form that makes your eyes hurt, simply upload, fill, and ask for AI assistance so you can sign with confidence. We currently use OpenAI and ChatGPT to power our chat with PDF experience but are constantly exploring the AI landscape as it evolves.

Prompting forms is great for:

1. Summary - quickly summarizing the purpose and main points of a form
2. Clarification - getting clarity and context, especially with legal jargon. Prompt well and you’ll find buried language and “gotchas” within each form.
3. Extraction - quickly getting key dates, names, and values out of a document
4. Translation - translating forms into other languages
5. Generation - create ideas for things that might be missing

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Chat with PDF is just one of the ways Popform uses AI to improve everyday tasks with your documents.
   
Instant organization with AI tags. No more lost forms or messy download folders. Popform’s dashboard uses AI to instantly tag forms by common life categories such as taxes, childcare, real estate, health & insurance, and more.
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2. OpenAI for PDFs

Open AI is a powerful way to chat with a PDF. The benefits of going directly to the source of the LLM technology is that you’re more guaranteed to have the latest in capabilities and accuracy. However, OpenAI and ChatGPT were made for many use cases and therefore their UX was not specifically designed to help you interact with PDF documents. Platforms like Popform or dedicated chat with PDF apps allow you to navigate the document and interact with AI side-by-side for a more intuitive experience.
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3. Claude for PDFs

Claude, created by Anthropic, is also capable of chat with PDF. Quite frankly, it’s hard to compare Claude, OpenAI, and Google’s Gemini at this point in time because results vary greatly based on the type of PDF you’re working with as well as the fact that the models evolve faster than any one article can keep up with. We’ve found ChatGPT 4.0, the latest release as of today, to be the best choice across a number of documents and for a number of use cases such as summary, translation, clarification, and extraction.

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4. ChatPDF

Unlike OpenAI and Claude, ChatPDF is purposefully built for PDF documents. In fact, ChatPDF is an AI wrapper which sounds negative but really means a more intuitive purpose-built experience powered by an underlying AI model. ChatPDF’s underlying model is OpenAI.
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PDF specific features include:

• side-by-side chat
• multi-file chat
• highlighting the associated text in the document
• contextual awareness (ie it knows which page you’re looking at)

This makes ChatPDF really great for research papers and informational documents. No surprise here, we still recommend Popform for contracts, waivers, legal documents, and any other type of form.  

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5. PDF.ai

There’s not much more to be said about PDF.ai that we didn’t already say about ChatPDF. These are two very similar products addressing a power PDF user who needs to engage and interact with longer form PDF documents and is geared towards researchers and institutions. PDF.ai is also powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and will give similar results although both platforms can tailor their requests to OpenAI and you might notice slight differences in the responses.

Oh, and did we mention that Popform is better for forms? Are you seriously still waiting to try it for free?

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How to chat with a PDF?

1. Go to any of the tools above
2. Upload a PDF
3. Start chatting

C'mon it really shouldn't be much harder than that right?

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How to chat with multiple PDFs?

Chatting with multiple PDFs let’s you search and extract information across a number of documents at once - the best part is that those documents don’t have to be organized in any particular way. Most platforms allow you to chat with multiple PDFs by:

1. Upload multiple files at once
2. OR upload multiple files individually over time
3. Prompt the AI

You can upload multiple documents to Open AI and Claude which both have “memory” meaning that you can ask it to find information based on documents you’ve uploaded individually over time as well.

ChatPDF and PDF.ai also support the ability to chat across your entire folder of PDFs that you’ve uploaded. We’re actively working on the ability to chat across all your PDF forms to extract important information.

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What’s the difference between chatting with a PDF and searching a PDF for information?

There are two main differences between the old way and new way of finding information within a PDF or even a folder of PDFs:

1. Text recognition. Not all PDFs contain actual text, some are simply a photo of text taken and need an extra layer of optical character recognition (OCR) to accurately retrieve the text from these documents. Using any modern AI platform avoids this because they can all extract the text either with OCR or generative AI capabilities built in.
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2. Exact match. CMD/CTRL + F is dead. Other PDF search tools like the one built into Mac Preview only allow you to find the words and phrases you know of within a document. Searching a PDF can’t help you when you know what you want exactly but not where to look exactly. In other words, it can’t take a broad question, infer your needs, and intelligently find and summarize the part of the document that addresses your need.