Talk To Your PDFs With ChatGPT/Bing Chat

Why read pages and pages when you can just ask?

Instead of reading PDFs, why not just ask the PDF questions and it will answer?

Here’s a screenshot of a session with Bing/Chat using the Edge browser :

There’s a PDF on the left, and Bing/Chat in the right sidebar. And I just asked Bing Chat questions about the PDF and it answered. Note the following:

• This was a local PDF file, not a web site (look at the address bar)

• The haemoglobin value was on page 5! So much easier to ask than to scroll through the entire PDF looking for the value

• As you can clearly see, it even understands the meanings of the columns here and was able to list all the values that were abnormal

Notes on how to use this:

• You must be using Bing/Chat in Edge (available on all platforms, including MacOS and Linux)

• Make sure you’re using “More Creative” mode. The other two modes are not very good

• You have to give Bing Sidebar permission to access the current tab.

  • Enable this setting: Settings > Sidebar > Discover > Page Context'

Of course, you can automatically create tables and charts from the data in the PDF, or use it to format and clean data.

And also, this works not just for PDFs but any web page or file type that opens in your browser.

Currently, this facility is unavailable with ChatGPT, but it will soon be. In the meantime, you can use third-party sites to do the same. Here are a couple of examples:

ChatPDF: Allows you to upload a PDF and then ask questions about the contents. (PDFs up to 150 pages are free; larger PDFs require you to take a paid plan.)

If you need to do something deeper with extraction of data from PDFs using GPT4, for example for your work, check out this article.