Fast Facts
- Upload a PDF and ask questions
- Suggests questions to ask based on your file
- Simple, easy-to-use utility
- Free for PDFs up to 120 pages - enough to cover many use cases
- Doesn't handle "aggregate" questions well, only specific questions where the answer is clearly specified in one place
- For example, "What were all the mentions of [X]?" wouldn't work since that requires reading the entire file
Free plan; $5/month
Our Review
One of the biggest questions about ChatGPT is - how do I get it to work with long documents?
For this, we have workarounds. While GPT-4 has a version that can handle up to 32K tokens of context (read: you could have ChatGPT work with ~50 pages of text), it's not publicly available yet.
So in the meantime, we have to use tools like ChatPDF. (Note: there are quite a few of these tools. They're all pretty much the same, so we chose the one we use most often.)
Q&As for your PDFs
Note that ChatPDF isn't "ChatGPT with your longer documents". Things it can do:
- Summarize the document
- Answer questions using information from the document
Things it can't do:
- Read in the entire document - it pulls the most relevant paragraphs when answering your question
- Generate any text - it's just Q&A, not a document rewriter/editor
For the full experience, we're going to have to wait for ChatGPT to expand its brain. Still, the functionality that ChatPDF offers is plenty enough for a wide swath of use cases.
Alternatives to ChatPDF
If you don't like ChatPDF (or if it goes down), you can also try: PDF.ai or AskYourPDF.com. If you're a Box user, Box AI also has the functionality (in beta at time of writing).
