Reading long PDF files is time-consuming and summarizing them is tedious. Luckily, you can take advantage of free AI tools to summarize PDF files quickly. What might take minutes or even hours can now be completed within moments. Here are a few AI-powered PDF summarizing tools that would work in any browser.
Note: You will need to upload the PDF file to the website which raises privacy and security concerns. Proceed only if you are okay with it. While most sites claim that they do not store these files and that they are deleted after a few hours, there is still a risk.
1. PDF.AI
First up is PDF.ai. All you have to do is upload the PDF file, and PDF.ai will be ready to take questions within seconds. During our test, we uploaded a 30MB file with 194 pages, and the PDF AI tool took less than 3 seconds to scan the document. While uploading the PDF, there is an option to mark the file as private, which is neat.
PDF.ai will answer the questions, and reference the page number if you want to cross-check which instills a sense of confidence while helping in further research. Answers are generated instantly and are accurate. Also, if you aren’t sure what questions to ask, PDF.ai can recommend a few to get you started.
Some advanced features like whitelabel, ChatGPT-4 support (requires credits), and API access are locked under paid plans that start at $10 per month.
Pros:
File size is capped at 10MB
Can ask up to 500 questions per month
Supports OCR
Privacy feature
Cons:
Requires sign-in
Free plan allows only 1 PDF file upload
Pro Tip: Since you can sign in using Gmail and GitHub accounts, you can use different IDs to get around this limit. That’s useful if you have a few PDFs to summarize.