ChatDOC vs ChatPDF: Which AI Reading Tool Reigns Supreme?

ChatDOC
5 min readJan 18, 2024

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Over the past year, the rise of ChatGPT has spawned numerous GPT-based AI tools, among which Chat PDF tools have gained significant popularity and attention.

These tools are particularly valuable for knowledge-intensive professionals, offering a substantial boost in productivity. With the proliferation of chat PDF tools, choosing the right one becomes crucial.
Next we’ll compare the features and differences between two chat pdf AI tools: ChatDOC and ChatPDF, to determine which one stands out with the most powerful capabilities.

Conclusion first: ChatDOC leads the way and is the best AI tool to chat with pdf.

Introduction of ChatDOC & ChatPDF

ChatDOC

Chat with documents. Get instant answers with cited sources.
Dive into PDFs like never before with ChatDOC. Let AI summarize long documents, explain complex concepts, and find key information in seconds.

Features:

  • Chat directly with documents to obtain key information, such as abstracts, summaries, analysis and any other information you want to know.
  • High-precision table/text/formula recognition, allowing you to select them and ask questions to dive into details.
  • Multi-file chat: Interact with multiple files simultaneously.
  • Thread: Ask follow-up questions for in-depth explanations.
  • Citation-backed responses: All answers are supported by direct quotes for your fact-check.
  • Broad file format support: Works seamlessly with PDF, doc/docx, scanned files, epub, html, txt, and markdown formats.
  • OCR for scanned files: Optical character recognition.
  • GPT-4 supported.
  • Customized prompt.

ChatPDF

Chat with any PDF. Students, researchers and professionals use it to instantly answer questions and understand research with AI.

Features:

  • Chat with PDF to obtain the information from the files.
  • Page citation: ChatPDF provides the page number for reference.
  • File format support: PDF.
  • Multi-language support.
  • GPT 3.5 Support.

The advantages of ChatDOC

Below are some practical features that performs better on ChatDOC than ChatPDF, or unique to ChatDOC.

One-click traceability

AI may lies, but ChatDOC doesn’t. ChatDOC is a reliable AI reading tool, because of its backed citations of every answers. You can click the page number or footnotes to trace the answer source back to the original parts. Not only every response, but even every segment of the answer has a reference at the end for fact-check.

ChatPDF only provides cited pages but doesn’t support inline citations, which is less reliable than ChatDOC.

Select and Ask

On ChatDOC, you can select texts/tables/formulas to ask more specific questions, letting AI focused on a certain content to explain in detail.

ChatPDF doesn’t support the “Select and ask” feature.

Multi-doc chat

Have a bunch of documents on the same topic that you need to analyze together? No problem, ChatDOC supports multiple documents chatting and querying. Upload a folder of files, ask questions to all the files at the same time and then you will get summarized answers from all the files within the folder.

Besides, you can choose to chat with partial files within the folder. Select the files and query about them, then you will get answers from the selected files.

Supported file formats

ChatDOC now supports a broad range of file formats, not only PDF documents, containing: word files(.doc, .docx), markdown, epub, txt, scanned files, websites. And the image supporting is on the planning.

  • For scanned files: ChatDOC has self-innovated OCR with high precision, which can recognize the texts and tables well even in scanned files.
    Here is a short video that shows you how ChatDOC performs well on scanned files: https://twitter.com/chatdoc_ai/status/1679453294958366720
  • For websites: paste a website url to directly chat with the content on the websites without downloads.

ChatPDF only supports PDF documents to chat.

Formula recognition

As we mentioned above, ChatDOC allows users to select texts/tables/formula to ask. Here, we should especially mention formula recognition.

Now matter how complicated the formula, just let AI explain it. Select the formula, or select the formula together with texts/tables to ask questions and pull out the information hidden in the formulas.

ChatPDF can not recognize formulas, which is imperfect for researchers to analyze the papers.

Chat with papers on arxiv.org

arxiv.org gives us lots of papers to read and now you have a chance to chat with them. When viewing a paper at arxiv.org,just add “chat” before the url and press “Enter”, then ChatDOC will be summoned in a second. Here starts your AI reading through quering without any downloads.

Here is a short video that shows you how to do it: https://twitter.com/chatdoc_ai/status/1719540954020147474

GPT-4 supported

ChatDOC now supports sending GPT-4 messages. Buy the GPT-4 quota and turn on the GPT-4 switch to get more accurate and detailed answers.

ChatPDF only supports GPT-3.5.

Which is the best AI tool to chat with PDFs?

So which one is more powerful and the best AI reading assistant for knowledge-intensive people? Here is a table that clearly shows the difference between ChatDOC and ChatPDF.

Undoubtedly, ChatDOC stands out as the superior choice in every aspect. Despite ChatPDF being launched earlier, ChatDOC consistently surpasses it by offering a range of advanced and highly useful features that build upon the basic functions provided by ChatPDF. Notably, ChatDOC is committed to ongoing innovation, striving to create a more comprehensive AI reading tool. This dedication is poised to revolutionize the landscape of document work, ensuring that users benefit from cutting-edge capabilities and an unparalleled user experience.

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