How ChatGPT Can Help You Do More With PDFs

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 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.

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.