How to chat with a PDF and get answers from it
· 4 min read
Ask a PDF questions in plain words and get answers taken from its own text, with the page numbers to check them.
Searching a PDF for a word only helps when you know the exact word. Chatting with it lets you ask the way you would ask a person: “When is the payment due?”, “What happens if I cancel?”, “Which models have the biggest battery?”. The answers come from the document, with the page they came from.
Start a chat in three steps
Questions that work well
What kind of PDF is it?
Ask: “What are my obligations?”, “How can this agreement be ended?”, “List every date and amount.” Then open the pages it cites and read those clauses yourself.
Ask: “What are the main findings?”, “What method was used?”, “What are the limits of this study?”
Ask: “How do I reset it?”, “What does error E4 mean?”, “What is in the box?”
Ask: “Explain this chapter simply”, “Give me five questions to test myself”, “What is the difference between X and Y?”
How the answers are made
Only the text of your PDF and your questions are sent, through our server, to an AI service. The AI is told to answer only from the document and to say so when the answer isn’t in it, instead of guessing. You can ask in any language and the answer comes back in the language of your question.
- Follow-up questions remember the last few answers, so you can say “and for the second one?”.
- Up to about 25 pages of text are read. Split a long PDF to chat with each part.
- Scans have no text: run OCR PDF first.
Always check important answers on the page the chat points to. AI can misread a table or a clause.
Questions people ask
Does Chat with PDF make things up?
It is told to answer only from your PDF and to say when something isn’t in it. Like any AI it can still make mistakes, so check important answers on the page it cites.
Can I ask questions in another language?
Yes. Ask in any language and the answer comes back in that language, even if the PDF is in English.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The PDF is opened in your browser and only its text and your questions are sent to the AI service.