Reading and deciphering dense, complex documents… that sounds like a lot of fun, doesn’t it? No? Ok, let’s face it: it’s not fun. It can be demanding and tiresome. Going through an academic paper, a journal article or dozens of pages of guidelines, terms and datasets in the hope of finding the answer to your question can make you pull your hair out. Is it possible to avoid this frustrating situation? Fortunately, yes. AI is here to, yet again, save the day.

AI PDF chat tools leverage natural language processing (NLP) to analyze and extract information from PDF’s, enabling users to ask questions, summarize content and search for specific details without manually scanning through pages. These tools can integrate with chatbots or virtual assistants, making it easy to retrieve relevant data from research papers, contracts, reports and other documents. Moreover, they support multiple languages, voice commands and integrations with cloud storage for seamless document management.

The main benefit of AI PDF chatbots is the fact that they help us enhance productivity and efficiency. Who exactly can they help? Professionals who need critical insights from lengthy documents – to save time and reduce human errors. Students and researchers – to analyze academic papers and textbooks more efficiently. Businesses – to streamline contract analysis, compliance checks and data extraction and hence reduce manual workload. Any other user who would like to retrieve valuable information from a PDF file in a quick and user-friendly manner.

In this article, we take a look at the 10 best AI tools that can help us quickly find anything we need in a PDF.

Google’s NotebookLM

NotebookLM is a solution developed by Google to help you interact in a smart way with PDF’s. Powered by Gemini 2.0, the tool can be considered your virtual research assistant, as it can aid you make sense of a wide range of documents and other types of content. You can ask it to explain in simple terms complex aspects of an academic paper or textbook chapter, to summarize a long article or identify market trends in your field of work. For each answer you’ll get clear citations, indicating the exact sources from the uploaded materials.

NotebookLM enables you to upload not only text, but also charts, slides, YouTube videos, web pages or audio content. You chat with AI about your files, add notes to properly organize your research or create a presentation outline with essential talking points. One of the interesting features is the Audio Overview, which basically lets you convert a PDF into a podcast. Two AI hosts have a real, “deep dive” discussion, providing a summary of your document and making associations between topics in an impressive manner. Once it’s generated, you can download the file and listen to it on the go.

The tool comes with an easy-to-understand interface, structured around three main workspaces: Sources – where you import your materials, Chat – where you can talk to the AI, and Studio – where you can instantly create audio overviews, briefing docs or study guides. Everything is clearly laid out, and it shouldn’t take long to learn how to use the platform.

Pros

• Ease of use.
• It provides reliable responses, citing the exact source.
• The Audio Overview feature is pretty cool, with realistic AI-generated discussions.
• The briefing docs and study guides to help you understand complex information.
• It comes with a free version.

Cons

• When importing a PDF, it automatically converts it into a text-only file, removing images, indentation and formatting.
• The customization settings are available in the premium plan.

Price

NotebookLM comes with a free version, which allows you use all the above-mentioned features, but upload a maximum of 50 sources. There’s also a premium version available, which offers more audio overviews, notebooks and queries, notebook customization, team collaboration options and additional privacy. NotebookLM Plus is available in Google One AI Premium for $19.99/month.

ChatPDF

ChatPDF is one of the first AI-driven tools developed to interact with PDF files. What is it? Well, as its website proudly states, it’s “ChatGPT, but for PDF’s”. Basically, the platform is designed to read, analyze and summarize a wide of range documents, from scientific papers and books to legal contracts, financial statements and training materials.

How does the magic happen? Well, ChatPDF uses advanced AI algorithms to understand the content and meaning of your document and to provide relevant responses complete with citations. The software leverages the GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini models to process the text and extract the requested information in a quick and efficient manner.

The tool gives you the possibility to add multiple files in a single conversation, to compare their content and find connections between them and also rewrite selected sections. You can upload PDF’s in any language you want and ask questions in your preferred language, as well as share your documents and chats with other through secure links. Besides PDF’s, the platform supports Word, PowerPoint, Markdown and Text files.

ChatPDF is intuitively designed with a side-by-side interface, which displays both your chat and document. Using it is truly simple. All you have to do is upload your file and ask a question in the bottom right prompt box. In the top right side, you’ll find the options to share, rename or export the chat and also to reset and delete it. You can open a new chat, as well as create a folder from the left sidebar.

Pros

• User-friendly design.
• It automatically generates a summary once you upload your document.
• You can get a summary for the whole document or for selected paragraphs/pages.
• It instantly identifies the language in the document and provides multilingual responses.
• You can use it even without signing up.
• Generous free plan.

Cons

• Occasional source inaccuracies.

Price

ChatPDF offers a free plan, which lets you analyze 2 documents per day, 120 pages per document, with a maximum file size of 10 MB, and ask up to 50 questions. If you want unlimited document analysis, questions and additional features, you’ll have to upgrade to the Plus plan. There are two options:

• Billed monthly: $13.99
• Billed annually: $5.58/month

AskYourPDF

AskYourPDF is an AI tool to chat with PDF from anywhere you want. You can interact with documents directly from your browser, use the Chrome extension, download the iPhone and Android app or integrate the tool with ChatGPT and Zotero. The software gives you the possibility to ask any question, get summaries, extract key info or have the text explained and rewritten. For that purpose it places at your disposal multiple AI models to choose from: GPT-4o Mini, GPT-4, Claude 3 Sonnet, Claud 3 Opus and Mistral.

AskYourPDF allows you to start conversations with multiple documents, to properly manage and organize your files in a library or convert a document into a podcast. Besides PDF, you can upload other formats like PPT, TXT, CSV, EPUB and RTF. One of the distinctive features is the number of AI tools available to help you with your written content. The platform is equipped with over 40 AI-powered tools to create literature reviews, generate essays, detect AI-generated content, generate lyrics, poems, acronyms or book titles, transform scanned PDF’s into editable text and much more.

As far as the UI goes, it’s not complicated to use, but it’s not as simplified and direct as ChatPDF for instance.

Pros

• It automatically generates a short summary and possible questions you could ask.
• It can accurately extract data from tables.
• The comprehensive collection of free AI tools.
• You can use it without registering.

Cons

• Not all AI tools work properly.

Price

AskYourPDF comes with a free plan, with limited features. For example, you can upload only 1 document per day, with a maximum of 100 pages, ask 50 questions and have 3 conversations. If you want to remove these limitations and gain access to more AI models, you’ll have to choose one of the paid plans:

• Premium: $11.99/month – billed yearly
• Pro: $14.99/month – billed yearly
• Enterprise – custom pricing

ChatDOC

ChatDOC is a solution built for professionals. No matter if you need to analyze financial statements or extract essential data from a technical manual, legal document or research paper, the software will generate precise answers in a matter of seconds. The tool can be accessed from its website or by installing its Chrome and Edge extension and lets you choose between multiple AI models: GPT-4o-mini, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Flash or DeepSeek-R1.

ChatDOC is equipped with a series of features to cater for every need. These include:

• Summarize – generate concise summaries.
• Extract – locate specific information, such as data and quotes.
• Analyze – perform in-depth analysis of tables, texts or images.
• Formula recognition – select a math formula and let the AI explain it to you.
• Rewrite – rephrase or rewrite paragraphs.
• Multi-file capability – upload multiple files and ask questions across all of them.
• Citation-backed replies – check answers by tracing responses back to the original document.

As opposed to other tools, ChatDOC’s interface is more complex and, at first, you may feel overwhelmed by the options and settings available. It may require more time to understand how everything works, but you should be able to figure it out after a couple of uses.

Pros

• The numerous options to interact with a document.
• The “select, click and ask” feature is really useful.
• The possibility to add follow-up questions.

Cons

• Some answers weren’t complete, and a follow-up was necessary to retrieve all information.

Price

ChatDOC has a free plan with limited uploads and questions. You can upload 5 files/day, 10 in total, ask 20 questions/day, 100 in total. To remove these restrictions and access more features, you’ll have to upgrade to the Pro plan for $89.90/year.

PDFgear

PDFgear is a fully-featured solution to manage PDF files. You can use it online, on your Windows or Mac or on the go on your iPhone or Android device. The software is packed with traditional features to convert and edit documents in multiple ways, but it also provides AI-based tools. These include the PDFgear Chatbot, powered by ChatGPT, to chat and interact with PDF’s and PDFgear Copilot – a more advanced AI assistant, inspired by Windows Copilot, which allows natural language interactions.

So what can you do with it? The Chatbot is able to search for specific information, explain concepts, summarize, translate and even rewrite lengthy documents such as textbooks, essays or legal contracts. The Copilot, on the other hand, gives you the opportunity to interact using natural commands. Simply type in the desired action in the chat box, such as “compress this document to 5 MB”, “rewrite the following paragraph” or “delete page 5”.

The software makes it possible to edit documents by editing/adding text, inserting images, links, watermark, signatures or graphic elements. You can fill out forms, compress, extract, crop, rotate or merge pages, as well as convert PDF to/from diverse image formats, Excel sheets or PowerPoint presentations.

Pros

• Clean and clear UI.
• The AI assistant to truly streamline your workflow.
• A comprehensive collection of PDF tools.
• It’s the only tool that’s entirely free.

Cons

• Some of the answers provided were simply incorrect.

Price

At the moment, PDFgear AI is free for everyone to use. There are no ads and no subscriptions.

Unriddle

Unriddle can be regarded as your personal AI research assistant. This is a tool created for researchers, scientists and students to help them understand complex materials, take notes and write content in an efficient way. One of the defining features of Unriddle is the fact that it allows you to upload a wide range of content to be explained. You can import PDF and other types of documents, plain text, images, videos and audio, record and chat with audio, as well as import directly from a website.

The AI provides quick, referenced responses so you can verify the accuracy, and offers the opportunity to paraphrase, rewrite and summarize text. An AI-based auto complete feature is also available, so you can speed up your workflow. The platform lets you map your content into an interactive graph, supports more than 90 languages and is equipped with collaborative features, which makes it ideal for teams. You can work with your colleagues simultaneously on chosen documents, create a centralized repository and control team access.

The UI is really easy to understand. Once you sign up, the main dashboard will provide the available options: you can write and cite with AI, import a file to chat with AI or record and chat with audio. The view is divided in two sections: one is for your uploaded material and the other for your AI conversation. If you want to take notes, click on the pencil icon in the top-right corner and a third screen will be opened.

Unriddle uses 4 AI models to deliver clear explanations. Users of the free plan can only resort to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, while Pro users can additionally access GPT-4o, DeepSeek R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash.

Pros

• It instantly identifies and displays the essence of each document.
• The possibility to extract info from a large variety of file types.
• The AI auto complete feature to enhance writing.
• Shared workspace for real-time collaboration.

Cons

• Occasional gaps in the answers provided.
• The response length is limited to 120 words in the free version.

Price

You can use the website free of charge with a maximum of 500 AI words, 5 imports, 1 recording and 120 pages per day. If you want to remove these limitations, you can upgrade to a paid plan. There are two packages:

• Pro: $12/month – billed yearly
• Team: $18/seat/month – billed yearly

MaxAI

MaxAI uses artificial intelligence to help you boost not only your productivity, but also your creativity. The features, accessible either from the web app or the Chrome/Edge extension, are quite diverse and make this a truly versatile tool. The platform boasts options to summarize long-form articles, to chat with various forms of content and get verifiable answers with direct links to web sources. This website can help you improve your writing and generate SEO-friendly content, translate text across numerous languages or create images using simple descriptions or detailed paragraphs.

MaxAI allows you to chat with any PDF and receive instant answers, to get insights from any web page, send email replies, summarize a YouTube video, a LinkedIn post or GitHub material, analyze an image, extract text and even solve math problems. One of the cool features of this tool is the fact that it can generate answers from multiple AI models at once. Simply import your document/text, choose how many models you’d like to chat with, get side-by-side responses, compare them and pick the best one. MaxAI is powered by various LLM’s, including DeepSeek, o3, GPT-4o, Claude-3.5, Llama 3.2 or Gemini-2.0.

In addition, the platform offers a series of free text, PDF and image tools. Among others, these make it possible to edit, convert, split, rotate, crop, sign or OCR PDF files, as well as compare two images/text files and find the differences between them.

Pros

• User-friendly design, accessible to any user.
• The large variety of AI-driven features.
• The free tools for editing and converting PDF files.
• The possibility to chat with multiple AI models simultaneously.

Cons

• It keeps pushing you to install its extension and upgrade to the premium plan, which can be off-putting.

Price

MaxAI comes with a free plan, which provides 10 content chats/day, 40 fast AI responses/day and limited uploads. Unlimited chats and replies, along with other features, are available within the Elite plan. This can be:

• Billed monthly: $30
• Billed annually: $12/month

PDF.ai

PDF.ai gives you the chance to chat with any PDF document, whether it’s a legal agreement, financial report, user manual or employee training. You can do it from its website, from the Chrome extension or by integrating it with Google Drive, Dropbox or Docusign. PDF.ai uses GPT-3.5-turbo as the default model to provide answers, but paid users can access advanced models such as GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

The platform lets you insert text questions in multiple languages, but it also offers the opportunity to take a screenshot from the PDF and ask about it. You can categorize your PDF’s using tags and also embed them on your website/platform. In addition to the AI PDF chatbot, the platform offers other tools. You can scan resumes and invoices, watermark and sign your documents, generate a quiz from educational content, OCR your PDF, convert PDF to and from various image formats such JPG, PNG and HEIC, resize the document and rotate all or individual pages in a PDF.

The process is pretty straightforward. Once you sign up, upload your document and start the conversation from the bottom-right section. The UI is split in two: your document on the left and your chat on the right, with all the options and settings easily accessible.

Pros

• Easy-to-navigate interface.
• It provides accurate answers with correct sources included.
• The option to create a prompt library for improved efficiency.
• The variety of PDF tools to perform other useful operations.

Cons

• Errors appeared when trying to upload documents or delete a chat.
• Unlike other tools, which supports multiple formats, it’s compatible only with PDF files.

Price

PDF.ai has a free version called Hobby, which allows you to upload 1 PDF file (max 10MB) for testing. There are three paid plans to choose from:

• Pro: $10/month – billed yearly
• Ultimate: $20/month – billed yearly
• Enterprise: $30/month – billed yearly

uPDF

uPDF is an all-round PDF editor that’s worth taking into consideration. It can be accessed on any device: on desktop (Windows and Mac), mobile (Android, iPhone/iPad) and on the web, it’s not difficult to use and it offers the right mix of classic and AI-based capabilities to enhance your PDF-related workflow. The software enables you to edit, annotate, convert, organize, merge, OCR and compare PDF’s, fill out forms or digitally sign your documents.

As far as the AI features goes, uPDF is able to summarize, explain, rewrite, answer questions and translate. The tool can sum up one or multiple PDF files, the entire text within the document or only selected sentences. You can chat with PDF, but also chat with an image. The AI assistant will identify the text, objects and patters in that image and generate descriptive responses. In addition, you have the possibility to create a mind map from a PDF to display ideas or concepts in an organized way and to translate documents in over 10 languages.

In terms of usability, uPDF ticks all the boxes. The interface is clean and easy to navigate, requiring a couple of clicks to access the desired feature.

Pros

• Simple, intuitive design.
• Plenty of features to boost your PDF workflow.
• It is able to quickly provide exact answers.
• One license for access on all platforms.

Cons

• It doesn’t support as many languages as other tools.
• It doesn’t always correctly identify the source of information in the document.

Price

uPDF offers a free trial version, which lets you analyze 5 files and ask 100 questions. There are three paid editions to choose from:

• Pro: $39.99/year
• Pro lifetime license: $69.99
• AI Assistant: $79/year

HiPDF

HiPDF is an online tool developed to streamline a wide range of PDF-related tasks. The website boasts numerous traditional tools for editing, converting and organizing such documents. These range from editing content to compressing, merging and protecting PDF’s. At the same time, it incorporates multiple AI-powered features to help you increase your productivity.

HiPDF uses various versions of ChatGPT for effective PDF content management. You can have artificial intelligence provide key answers from research papers or textbooks, summarize documents, articles or paragraphs, explain complex terminology, extract essential info from a financial or market report or rewrite text in a clear manner. Users also have the possibility to check and correct the spelling, grammar and punctuation, translate PDF documents in over 50 languages and verify if the content from a PDF or given text is AI-generated.

Using this platform’s AI capabilities is quite intuitive. The interface is clearly structured, displaying all the PDF-related options on the left and three views: a thumbnail view, one of the imported document and the AI chat on the right side. In order to interact with a PDF, all you have to do is follow these simple steps:

1. Upload your file.
2. Choose your prompt: Summarize, Explain, Rewrite or Ask Anything.
3. Ask your questions in the bottom-right chat box.

Pros

• Intuitively-designed.
• Extensive list of basic PDF tools for various tasks, including batch processing.
• Useful AI-driven features, from summarizing to proofreading articles.
• The automatic, concise summary generated.

Cons

• No clickable citation sources.

Price

HiPDF offers a free trial, during which you can import PDF documents up to 20 pages, with a maximum size of 10 MB. Users who upgrade to the premium version or purchase a separate exclusive AI service can enjoy processing documents up to 150 pages, with a maximum size of 100 MB. You can choose between:

• Monthly plan: $5.99/month
• Yearly plan: $3.33/month