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Chat with PDF

Ask questions and get instant answers.

Drop files or click to browse

PDF · up to 100MB per file

About Chat with PDF

Search finds words; questions need answers. 'What is the notice period?' is not a keyword you can Ctrl+F for, because the document may phrase it as 'either party may terminate on thirty days' written notice'.

Chatting with a document lets you ask in plain language and get an answer drawn from the text you uploaded.

How to use Chat with PDF

  1. Step 1

    Upload the PDF

    Add a document with extractable text.

  2. Step 2

    Ask your question

    Type it in plain language, as you would ask a colleague.

  3. Step 3

    Verify the answer

    Check the answer against the relevant passage in the document.

When it helps

  • Asking a contract about notice periods, penalties or renewal terms.
  • Querying a manual for the specific setting you need.
  • Checking what a policy says about a situation you are facing.
  • Locating figures buried in a long financial report.

Good to know

  • Answers come from the uploaded document, but language models can still misread or over-generalise. Confirm anything consequential in the source text.
  • Scanned documents need OCR before they can be queried.
  • Ask one specific question at a time for the most reliable answers.

Chat with PDF: frequently asked questions

Working with AI on documents, sensibly

Extraction comes before intelligence

Every AI document feature begins with the same unglamorous step: turning the file into text. A digital PDF exposes its characters directly; a scan must be read by OCR first. Whatever reaches the model is only as good as that extraction, which is why a crisp export and a crooked photograph of the same page produce noticeably different answers.

If a result looks wrong, check the extracted text before blaming the model. Missing columns, merged words and dropped diacritics almost always trace back to the source rather than the analysis.

Context windows and long documents

A language model can only consider a limited amount of text at once. Long documents are therefore handled in sections, with the results combined — a reliable approach for summaries and question answering, and a weaker one for questions that require holding the entire document in mind at the same time, such as counting every occurrence of a term across four hundred pages.

Ask focused questions about specific sections rather than sweeping questions about the whole file, and you will get markedly more dependable answers.

Verify before you rely

Models produce fluent text whether or not they are certain, so a confident summary can still misstate a figure, a date or a negation — the last being especially costly in contracts, where dropping a single 'not' inverts the meaning. Treat output as a well-informed first draft.

Spot-check anything consequential against the source page, and never paste material you are not permitted to share into any AI tool, including this one. Where a document is confidential, prefer the browser-only tools that never transmit it anywhere.

Common problems and fixes

The tool says it found no text
The document is image-only. Run OCR to create a text layer, then repeat the request.
The summary misses an important section
Summaries prioritise recurring themes. Ask directly about the section you care about instead of requesting a general overview.
Numbers or names appear slightly wrong
OCR routinely confuses 0 with O and 1 with l, and models can carry the error forward. Verify figures against the original page before using them.

Terms worth knowing

OCR
Optical character recognition — converting pictures of text into machine-readable characters.
Context window
The maximum amount of text a language model can consider in a single request.
Hallucination
A confident but incorrect statement produced by a language model that is not supported by the source.

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