For Students
Ask Questions About a Research Paper — with Citations
A long research paper is often faster to interrogate than to read start to finish — what's the actual methodology, what limitations did the authors admit, what did section 4 conclude. Chat with PDF is built for exactly that: ask a specific question and get an answer grounded in the paper's own text, not a general summary.
Every answer comes with page citation cards showing the exact quote it was based on, checked against the paper's extracted text before it's shown — so you can verify a claim against the source in one click instead of re-reading the whole section to confirm it. This matters more for research use than casual reading, since misreading a methodology or a stated limitation is the kind of mistake that compounds into your own work.
One real limit to know before you start: the tool works on searchable PDFs up to 50 MB and 1,000 pages. If your paper is a scanned copy (common with older or photocopied papers) rather than a native digital PDF, run it through PDF OCR first — Chat with PDF needs selectable text to find anything, and a scan without OCR is just a page image to it.
How to handle this workflow
Launch the Chat with PDF and load your document. No account creation or software installation is required.
Select your preferred settings. Core processing runs on your device, keeping your documents confidential and private.
Inspect the output to confirm page quality and formatting, then save your updated PDF directly to your device.
Can I chat with a scanned research paper PDF?
Only if it has selectable text — Chat with PDF needs searchable text to work from, so run a scanned paper through PDF OCR first. It also only works on PDFs up to 50 MB and 1,000 pages.