Did you get a poorly scanned textbook as homework for tomorrow? Did your boss drop a 70 page financial report on your desk to analyse over the weekend? Fear not! The newest addition to the vast pool of online AI ressources is here to save you. In this article, we’ll be looking into the best AI PDF readers, both free and paid, and some general know-how when using these tools. We’ll explore each tool’s capabilities when it comes to summarization, explanation, and overall usage of PDF files. Nobody likes to read a 100 page PDF file. I don’t at least. However, sometimes it’s necessary – so why not use AI.
AI PDF readers featured in the article
- PopAI (Free & paid)
- PDF.ai (Free & paid)
- AskYourPDF (Free & paid)
- ChatGPT-4 (Paid)
- Claude (Free & paid)
Does my PDF have OCR?
Before we get started with the AI PDF readers, we’ll have a quick look into the formatting of PDF files. The formatting will be important when determining which tool is the best for your specific use case, and if any prerequisite steps are required.
Most importantly, we want to find out whether your PDF file is formatted as text through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or if it’s text on an image (ex. scanned documents). Most of the time this is very obvious to tell, but if you’re ever in doubt just try to highlight the text in your PDF file with your cursor. If you’re able to clearly highlight the text it’s most likely with OCR and if not, it’s probably an image.
This is important, because most free AI PDF readers won’t be able to read the text in your PDF file, if it’s formatted as an image.
No OCR: Formatted as image
With OCR: Formatted as text
What is OCR?
OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is like a magic wand for turning printed or handwritten text into digital gold. Imagine you have a physical document, like a page from a book or a handwritten note. You scan it, but your computer sees just a picture, not the actual words. This is where OCR comes in, transforming those images of text into actual, editable words that your computer understands.
It’s a bit like teaching your computer to read. The OCR software examines each line and character in the image, decoding them into letters and numbers. This tech isn’t just about recognizing shapes; it’s smart enough to understand various fonts and handwriting styles, making sense of everything from a typewritten report to a quick scribble.
How do I generate a text file from a PDF image?
There are multiple tools for creating a text file from a PDF image available online. In our opinion, the best online OCR service is Nanonets. Nanonets offers an online OCR service, where you upload your PDF file, and the AI will output a text file (.txt) with all the text from your PDF. The service is free for the first 500 pages, whereafter it charges $0.3 per page.
Now let’s get to the AI PDF readers.
1. PopAI: (Best free version)
Price: $8.33/month (Free version available)
Usability: Excellent (automatic OCR parsing!)
Performance: Fast and accurate
PopAi is an AI tool that makes managing PDFs easy and interactive. It’s great for people who have lots of PDFs to handle. You can quickly find the PDF you need with its neat organising features like tagging and searching. Plus, it’s cool because you can chat with your PDFs! This means you can ask questions and get summaries, although these summaries are pretty basic. It’s especially handy for those who need to digitise printed documents, as it recognises text in photocopies too. In other words, there’s no need to go through the process of formatting your PDF file through OCR, PopAi will do it automatically. The OCR parsing is even available without the paid subscription, which makes PopAI the best free AI PDF reader in our humble opinion.
Highlighted features
- Automatic OCR parsing
- ChatGPT integrated features
- Can read 2000 pages in a PDF (in paid version)
- App available
- Support 200+ languages
Pros
- Can read text on image
- Low subscription costs
- Many complementary features (presentation & content generation)
Cons
- Summaries are basic, not very detailed.
- More about organising PDFs than deeply analysing them.
2. PDF.ai (Best paid version)
Price: $10/month (Try for free!)
Usability: Very easy – intuitive interface + chrome extension
Performance: Excellent – precise, even with large files
PDF.ai is a smart AI PDF reader, specialised for this very purpose. It’s like chatting with your PDFs – you type a question or command, and it finds the info right from the document. This makes going through long or complex PDFs much easier. Plus, PDF.ai gives you helpful hints about what to ask, so you don’t get stuck. Besides, it has some of the best capabilities, when it comes to amount and size of your PDFs in the 1-tier paid version. It’s not just for reading on your computer; there’s a handy browser extension, and it works with files in Google Drive and Dropbox too. For those worried about privacy, PDF.ai keeps your data safe and even has a special feature for private documents.
Highlighted features
- Very clean chat interface
- Chrome extension
- OCR support
- Accurate referencing
- API access
Pros
- Affordable subscription
- OCR support
- Can read large files (100 x 50MB in paid version)
- Good customer support
Cons
- Free trial is limited to one PDF
- Free trial can only read OCR formatted PDF
Wanna check out other cool AI tools?
Didn’t find what you were looking for? Check our index of curated AI tools in multiple different categories. Hopefully, you’ll find something you like.
3. AskYourPDF (Best for education)
Price: $9.99/month. Free version available.
Usability: Very easy – primed for learning/education
Performance: Good – fast, accurate and many features
AskYourPDF started as a ChatGPT plugin, but is now a fully fledged AI PDF reader. In other words, it’s dedicated to the sole purpose of reading, summarising, analysing, and transforming PDF files, which can’t be said of most other tools on this list. This is not only shown in the actual PDF handling, but also through complementary tools such a PDF merger and splitter.
AskYourPDF differentiates itself in the AI PDF reader space by transforming PDF documents into interactive chat partners. This allows users to engage in conversations with their documents. This conversational feature enables users to ask questions directly to the PDF and receive responses, making the reading experience more engaging and interactive.
Also, we love the chrome extension.
Highlighted features
- Chrome Extension for easy interaction with PDF documents.
- Documents become interactive chat partners.
- AI-powered system for accurate information retrieval and learning.
- Smart navigation to avoid tedious scrolling.
- Capabilities to track and revisit conversations with documents
Pros
- Provides example questions based on the PDF
- Offers a lot of other PDF-related tools ( ex. PDF-merger/splitter)
- Chrome extension
- API available
Cons
- 100 page limit on free version
- No OCR on free version
4. ChatGPT-4 (Best for multipurpose)
Price: $20/month
Usability: Very easy – other features only makes it easier
Performance: Fast, but struggles a bit with larger PDF files
You can now upload PDF files directly into ChatGPT-4. OpenAI heard our prayers, so there’s no need for messy plug-ins that work 50% of the time anymore. ChatGPT-4, although not a dedicated PDF reader, can be a handy tool when working with PDF content. You can essentially upload all kinds of files with the new feature, however, if you want it to read your PDF make sure it’s formatted as text through OCR or extract the text (through Nanonets for instance) and upload it as a .txt file.
Uploading files into ChatGPT is a new feature, and so there are a few points where it’s lagging behind some of its competitors. First of all, I really miss the automatic page referencing that you get with PDF.ai and PopAI. ChatGPT will reference the entire uploaded file as a default, but luckily, you can prompt to reference specific pages, which works decently. It also struggles a bit with larger files. I gave it a 400 page (10MB) PDF with OCR, which it could read (luckily), but its performance speed deteriorated as a result.
Highlighted features
- Well known and well functioning interface
- Useful capabilities (math, coding etc.)
- Very good at creating new content from uploaded material
Pros
- Great for breaking down complex PDF content.
- Can generate additional related material or ideas.
- Helpful in explaining or clarifying document content.
- User-friendly and conversational interface.
Cons
- PDF have to be OCR formatted
- No page referencing
- Struggles with larger files
- File upload is not available on free version
5. Claude (Fastest version)
Price: $20/month for Pro. Free version available.
Usability: Decent – Intuitive interface, but formatting requirements are strict
Performance: Good – very fast, but will require preformatting
Anthropic’s Claude, while primarily a large language model, offers functionalities to handle PDF reading through external libraries like PyPDF2 (open-source python PDF library). This integration allows Claude to read, summarise, and analyse text from PDF files. Its large context size of up to 100,000 tokens makes it suitable for processing long documents efficiently. To clarify, 1 token is approximately 3.5 characters on average.
The free version of Claude allows you to upload 5 files with sizes up to 10MB each, which is beyond most free PDF readers. However, the model requires preformatting, so the easiest way to get it to read your PDF is by converting into a .txt file first. Once your upload has the desired formatting, Claude works like a charm; super fast and accurate.
Highlighted features
- Uses external libraries (PyPDF2) for PDF reading.
- Can summarize and analyze text from PDFs.
- Suitable for long documents due to large token capacity.
Pros
- 5 x 10MB file size is better than most other free versions
- Good performance speed
Cons
- Relies on external libraries for PDF reading capabilities.
- Sensitive to formatting (So basic OCR is not enough)
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FAQ about AI PDF readers
Is there a free AI PDF reader?
Yes, absolutely! Most of the tools featured in this article offers free versions of their PDF readers, most notable are PDF.ai, PopAI and AskYourPDF. The free versions usually offer basic functionalities, such as reading or extracting text from PDFs. Often, the largest difference between the free and paid options are the sizes and amount of files you can upload. The pricing and features can vary widely between different AI PDF tools.Can ChatGPT read PDF files?
Yes, as a new addition to the many features of ChatGPT you are now able to upload files to the chat (including PDF’s). However, this feature is only available on the GPT-4 model, which is part of ChatGPT Plus.Can I extract text from PDF using AI?
Yes, using AI platforms such as Nanonets you can upload a PDF file (whether it’s a scanned text or formatted as text) and convert into a .txt file. You can try it out free, it works very well in our opinion.Can PDF readers read financial statements?
Most of the AI PDF readers on this list are capable of reading and interpreting financial statements. They can help in extracting key financial data, summarising content, and sometimes even offering insights based on the data. Beware that you might need to opt in for the paid version of these tools, because the file-size of financial statements are quite often larger than what the free versions allow. Also, don’t expect the tools to be able to interpret graphs and other visual elements in the financial statement – we have to wait a bit for that kind of capability.