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ChatPDF opens a whole new world for students and professionals. You can summarize and understand the whole book in 5 minutes, or you can even use it to understand highly technical legal contracts. Just like ChatGPT, you can ask questions from the books, and it will help you learn a certain concept or story. 

How does ChatPDF Work? 

After uploading the PDF file, ChatPDF analyzes the PDF file by creating a semantic index and sharing relevant paragraphs with a text-generation AI. After that, you can use it to extract information from files. ChatPDF works smoothly with large files like manuals, legal contracts, books, and research papers.

ChatPDF Examples 

Recruiters can use the ChatPDF API to create a system that will help them ask questions from candidates through their resumes. It will help improve the hiring process as pre-screening will be done by AI. 

In this case, I am uploading my old resume from 2021 to learn more about my past self. By accessing chatpdf.com, you will see the front page explaining where it can be used and 3 options to add the PDF file. You can directly provide the link, upload the file, or search for the PDF. 

Image from ChatPDF

After uploading my resume, I asked ChatPDF to summarize the resume and then explored more about my work experience. 

The UI is pretty similar to ChatGPT.  

Image from ChatPDF

Let’s upload a free Applied Data Science book by Ian Langmore and Daniel Krasner using the link. 

Image from ChatPDF

Instead of summarizing, I chose to learn about the data-cleaning pipeline mentioned in the book. The answer is good but not as good as ChatGPT. Maybe code blocks are missing. 

Image from ChatPDF

You can use ChatPDF to read the entire book in under 5 minutes and even ask questions if you forgot about something. It’s like talking to your book, solving mysteries together. 

Limitations 

By creating the account, you can view your previous chat session, but there are limitations, and if you are used to the free ChatGPT experience, you will get annoyed by 3 PDFs per day and 50 questions. You can overcome your frustration by buying a Plus membership. 

Image from ChatPDF

I think developers are using GPT-3 or similar open-source models at the backend. There were many occasions when ChatPDF failed to understand the context and gave wrong interpretations. Other limitations are related to technical content like code blocks, tables, etc. You can still ask the bot to write Python code, and it will display the code, but it is not that great compared to ChatGPT. 

Wrap up

We have a new tool, and I love using it to understand my contracts, books, and research papers. It is at an early stage, and we can see improvement in terms of performance in the future. 

I hope you like this new tech, and if you want me to cover more AI tools in the future, do let me know in the comments.
 
 
Abid Ali Awan (@1abidaliawan) is a certified data scientist professional who loves building machine learning models. Currently, he is focusing on content creation and writing technical blogs on machine learning and data science technologies. Abid holds a Master's degree in Technology Management and a bachelor's degree in Telecommunication Engineering. His vision is to build an AI product using a graph neural network for students struggling with mental illness.