How to Use Ask Your PDF in ChatGPT

Many among us spend plenty of time reading and scrolling through lengthy PDF files to find relevant information or grasp the main concepts. However, this traditional way of consuming PDFs is becoming more efficient and modernized with the "Ask Your PDF" feature offered by AI chatbots. AI chatbots now allow us to have direct conversations with the PDF, ask questions about the content, or even get a summary of the whole PDF instantly. So, if you also have to deal with lengthy PDFs continuously, the ask your pdf AI feature makes your job a lot easier. Therefore, this article explores in detail how to use the plugin "Ask Your PDF" in ChatGPT. Besides that, the article also covers the more efficient and direct way to chat with the PDF through UPDF without the plugin, the ChatGPT-powered AI tool.

Part 1. An Alternate Way to Chat with Your PDF with ChatGPT-powered AI Tool [FREE]

As mentioned in the intro, ChatGPT requires a plugin to let you chat with the PDF. So, before we discuss how to use Ask Your PDF in ChatGPT, let's first highlight an alternate way to chat with the PDF through a ChatGPT-powered AI tool called UPDF AI.

UPDF AI is an intelligent and powerful AI tool specifically designed to handle PDF documents. It allows you to upload PDFs and use its chat box to directly ask document-related questions or let it summarize, translate, and explain document content. You don't have to use any plugin or additional tool to chat with the PDF. In short, UPDF AI integrates all the AI assistant capabilities and provides a user-friendly interface to get the job done easily. Download to try it out for free.

However, if you still want to use ask your PDF in ChatGPT, check Part 2.

Pros of using UPDF AI

The below points about UPDF AI reflect why it is an effective and recommended way to chat with PDF compared to the Ask Your PDF plugin in ChatGPT:

1. Upload and Ask Directly: UPDF AI allows you to upload the PDF and ask questions about the content directly. You don't have to visit any other website to upload a PDF or use any reference link while asking questions.
2. Support Chart Analysis and Summarization: UPDF AI not only empowers you to ask content-related questions but also supports chat analysis and even summarizing the whole content.
3. Select Document Content to Summarize/Translate/Explain: UPDF AI "Chat" mode can summarize, translate, and explain any selective document content.
4. Support Large-sized PDF Files: UPDF allows you to upload 100-page PDFs and provide accurate summarization, translation, and explaination within minutes.
5. Make Changes to PDFs as You Want: UPDF is more than an alternative to "Ask Your PDF" plugin. It also works as a comprehensive PDF editor, annotator, converter, etc.

In short, UPDF AI serves as a dedicated tool to handle all aspects of PDF documents directly and instantly with its ChatGPT-powered AI chat box. Follow the below steps to use ask your PDF AI technology with UPDF AI:

Step 1. Open the PDF Document in UPDF AI

Download, install and launch UPDF on your Windows or Mac system. Open your PDF document in UPDF and click the UPDF AI icon from the bottom right corner.

Step 2. Let AI Read and Analyze the Document's Content

In the UPDF AI window, select the "Ask PDF" tab and click "Get Started" to upload the PDF and let AI analyze the document content.

Step 3. Ask Document-Related Questions

Now you can ask anything related to the PDF content. For example, you can ask it to "summarize this PDF within 50 words, including 3 points".

Step 4. Translate PDF Content

If you want to translate some document content, switch to the "Chat" mode. Afterward, pick the "Translate" option from the drop-down menu above the chat box and choose the translation language. Next, paste the document content you want to translate and get the translated version right away.

Step 5. Explain Complicated Words

If the PDF contains some words for which you want more explanation, change the "Translate" option to "Explain" and ask UPDF AI the question, such as "What is net sales".

That's it! This way, UPDF AI provides a one-stop solution to chat with your PDF directly through its intuitive and intelligent approach.

Part 2. Steps to use Ask Your PDF Plugin in ChatGPT AI

For ChatGPT, you have to use the Ask Your PDF plugin to chat with the PDF. Follow the below steps to learn how to use Ask Your PDF in ChatGPT:

Step 1. Go to OpenAI. 

Step 2. Click the "3-dots icon" from the bottom left corner and then click "Settings".

Step 3. Go to the "Beta features" settings and turn on "Web browsing" and "Plugins". Once done, close the pop-up.

Step 4. Click the "GPT-4" tab from the top bar and then click "Plugins".

Step 5. Search for the "AskYourPDF" plugin and install it.

Step 6. In the ChatGPT chat box, type "upload a PDF". Afterward, click the "Upload Document" hyperlink.

Step 7. In the new tab, upload your PDF document and copy the document ID.

Step 8. Come back to ChatGPT and start asking questions about the document using the document id. For instance, type "What is this document about? doc_id: xxx".

This way, you can use ChatGPT with the Ask Your PDF plugin to upload the PDF and do direct conversations with the PDF content.

Part 3. Edit, Annotate, Convert, & Fill your PDF with UPDF

UPDF is more than just a PDF AI assistant tool. It is a complete PDF editor tool that incorporates all the features anyone needs to manage all aspects of the PDF, from editing to organizing. So, other than the UPDF AI feature, the other top-notch features of UPDF are as follows:

• Edit: UPDF can edit the text, image, links, backgrounds, headers, footers, and other elements of the PDF. It even allows you to add a watermark, change text font/color, or do other customizations with the PDF.
• Annotate: UPDF can annotate PDF with different PDF markup tools, such as highlighting, underlining, adding text boxes, writing comments, adding stamps, inserting signs, etc.
• Convert: UPDF can convert PDF into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, image, text, or other formats.
• Organize: UPDF makes it easy to organize PDF pages, such as delete, rearrange, crop, split, extract, replace, or rotate.
• OCR: UPDF intelligent OCR technology accurately recognizes text in scanned PDFs and converts them into editable and searchable PDFs.
• Compress: UPDF provides a click-based approach to reduce the PDF file size without losing quality.
• Batch: UPDF batch feature provides a time-efficient way to convert, print, encrypt, or do other activities on multiple PDFs at once.

To sum up, UPDF incorporates every single feature that users need to handle their PDFs proficiently. For instance, they can use UPDF AI to get the summary of the PDF and then use its edit feature to add the summary to the PDF right away. Try it for free now!

Part 4. FAQs About Ask Your PDF in ChatGPT

Q1. How does ask your PDF work in ChatGPT?

The ask your PDF works in ChatGPT with the help of the "Ask Your PDF" plugin. The plugin allows you to upload the PDF to its server and then use the "Document ID" to ask PDF-related questions in ChatGPT.

Q2. Can you upload a PDF file to ChatGPT?

Unfortunately, ChatGPT does not support PDF file upload. You have to either use the dedicated plugin or ChatGPT-powered tools, like UPDF AI, to upload the PDF file to ChatGPT.

Q3. What is the best ChatGPT plugin for reading PDF?

Out of many plugins available to read PDFs in ChatGPT, the "Ask Your PDF" plugin is the best one. It uploads the PDF to its server and then provides the Document ID with which you can let ChatGPT read the PDF and ask further questions.

Alternatively, if you don't want to use the plugin and want to directly make ChatGPT read PDF, then UPDF AI is the best option. It is powered through ChatGPT and provides a direct way to conveniently read and ask from the PDF.

Conclusion

The AI advancements have made it much easier to read, analyze, and ask from PDFs, especially with ChatGPT. The only downside of ChatGPT is that it does not support direct PDF uploads. To make ChatGPT answer questions about the PDF content, the above steps on how to use Ask Your PDF plugin in ChatGPT can overcome the limitation. However, the much better and recommended way is to use UPDF AI, the intelligent ChatGPT-powered AI assistant. It not just provides a direct way to upload and ask from PDF but also makes it easy to summarize, translate, explain, and do other customizations with PDF. So, do check out UPDF AI and see how well it fulfills your needs.