I cannot count how many research papers I’ve had to read over the past few years for my studies. Thoroughly reading lecture requirements, assignment research, or even exploratory literature reviews, have taken up a lot of my time. This is why I was pleasantly surprised to hear about a new tool a couple of weeks ago, one that promises to make reading journal articles easier and faster.
This tool, named ChatPDF, uses a large language model (LLM) to extract concepts and ideas from a submitted PDF (ChatPDF, n.d.). It then allows users to interact with the data through a chat, like ChatGPT, except the answers it provides are based on the knowledge presented in the PDF. Additionally, answers contain references to the source in the submitted document.
Of course, as this could be a potential timesaver, I wanted to try it out, and after using ChatPDF for the past week I have some thoughts. Overall, it does great in highlighting broad search queries and summarizing certain parts of text, but there are some caveats. The main problem is that it produces accurate statements 80% or 90% of the time, sometimes missing out on some crucial context. This does not sound too bad, but the fact that you don’t know when it got something wrong, and how badly it messes up, greatly hinders usability.
So, would I recommend ChatPDF? If you plan on thoroughly reading a paper and want to enhance your experience by e.g. having short recaps or an advanced quick search on the side, I would. As long as you don’t solely rely on the information the LLM presents it is a handy tool in providing enhancing information. In such a case, it does make reading papers easier and somewhat faster.
The subscription prices happen to be quite in line with my preferred use case, as the free version allows for two PDF documents a day and a total of 50 questions. The paid subscription, at $20 a month, allows both an unlimited number of PDFs and questions. (ChatPDF, n.d.)
Sources:
ChatPDF. (n.d.). ChatPDF – Chat with any PDF! Retrieved October 20, 2023, from https://www.chatpdf.com/
