ChatDOC
PAI Tech · Productivity
ChatDOC is an AI PDF chat assistant built by PAI Tech that lets you chat with PDF files instead of skimming them. You ask a question in plain language and get the answer back with citations. Upload a PDF, Word file, scanned page or website URL, and it summarizes, extracts and explains the content, then cites the page and snippet behind every answer. It runs in a browser plus Chrome and Edge extensions. A free plan covers light use before the Pro subscription takes over.
About ChatDOC
What Is ChatDOC
ChatDOC is an AI document assistant for people who have to read a lot and remember the details. Instead of skimming 300 pages hunting for one figure, you ask a question and get an answer with a citation pointing back to the source line. That's the whole idea. It handles PDF, Word, Markdown, ePub, TXT, scanned files and web pages. It answers in whichever language you wrote the question.
The feature that separates it from a general chatbot is traceability. Every claim carries page numbers, reference markers and highlighted values you can click to jump into the original file. For anyone doing legal review, financial analysis or academic research, that audit trail is the difference between a usable answer and a guess.
Two limits matter. The AI understands text and tables inside your file. It isn't a knowledge base about the world, so odd phrasings pull odd results. The free plan is small, too: 5 files a day, 10 files in total and a 300-page cap per PDF. That runs out fast on real research work.
Getting Started
- Sign up at chatdoc.com with email, Google or a phone number. No card needed.
- Upload a file by dragging and dropping, clicking Upload, or pasting a whitelisted web URL via the Chat with Websites button.
- Ask a question in the chatbox, or highlight a table, formula or paragraph and hit the ChatDOC button to query just that selection.
- Follow up in the same thread, or drop a folder into a collection to query several files at once.
- Verify the answer. Click the cited page number, reference or highlighted number to jump to the original passage.
Product Information
A quick look at ChatDOC's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.
Best for
The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.
Users
- Researchers and grad students
- Lawyers and compliance teams
- Business and financial analysts
Tasks
- Summarizing a long PDF
- Finding a specific figure or clause
- Cross-document review
- Translation
Scenarios
- Working through a stack of research papers
- Reviewing a product manual or spec sheet
- Checking a contract before signing
Key features
Source-Traceable Answers
Every answer links back to where it came from. Page number citations jump to the section, reference citations open the exact snippet, and highlighted numbers connect a figure to its place in the original table. ChatDOC calls the newer version TapSource, and it adds word-level tracing on top of the older page and citation layers. Judge the product on this. A document tool that can't show its work isn't worth trusting with a contract.
Multi-Document and Folder Chat
Upload a folder of files into a collection and question all of them, or just the ones you select, in a single conversation. There's no file limit inside a collection on Pro. That's the difference between asking one paper a question and comparing ten of them. As a document analysis tool for literature reviews and due diligence, it's where the time actually gets saved.
Broad File and Format Support
ChatDOC reads PDF, Word (.doc and .docx), Markdown, ePub, TXT, scanned documents and website content. Scanned pages go through OCR, up to 500 pages every 30 days on Pro, and OCR became free for all users in the 1.7.9 release. Formulas get recognized alongside text and tables, so equations in technical papers survive the trip. If a source isn't a file at all, paste a URL and chat with the page instead.
Built-In Model Choice and Custom Models
The default setup runs on hosted models including GPT-5 mini, DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini, with reasoning-chain visualization on the DeepSeek integration. If you'd rather use your own account, you can connect a custom model through OpenAI or OpenRouter by entering an API key under Response Model. A nice side effect: with custom models the key stays in your browser rather than on ChatDOC's servers. The tradeoff? You're now maintaining the model connection yourself.
Table, Formula and Cross-Page Parsing
Long reports lean on tables that spill across pages. A parser that loses those rows produces confident wrong answers. ChatDOC's engine keeps table structure, recognizes formulas and reassembles elements split across page breaks. The same engine powers the standalone PDF Parser API, which the company says was trained on more than ten million document pages. Hard to verify that number, but the table handling is visibly the product's strongest technical ground.
Browser Extension for Chrome and Edge
The ChatDOC extension puts the assistant in your toolbar so you can open a local or online PDF and start asking without uploading it to the web app first. It's free to install, and Pro features are available inside it. Handy when you're reading on a publisher's site and don't want to download the file. Also handy when you keep a manual open in a second tab.
API and PDF Parser for Developers
ChatDOC sells API access for teams that want the same document Q&A inside their own software. Pricing runs on packages: questions, PDF pages, OCR pages and document tokens, with document tokens at $6 per 3 million, GPT-4 questions at $20 per 100, and OCR pages at $4 per 100. The PDF Parser API outputs JSON or Markdown and starts at $1 per 100 pages pay-as-you-go. Pages and questions are sold separately, so budgeting takes some arithmetic.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Citations are genuinely traceable at word level, so you can check any answer against the original text in one click.
- Folder-level multi-document chat makes comparing several sources a single conversation instead of a tab-juggling exercise.
- Custom model support lets you run answers through your own OpenAI or OpenRouter key, keeping that key local to the browser.
- Format coverage goes past PDF to Word, ePub, Markdown, scanned files and web pages, with OCR now free for everyone.
- A free plan and a Chrome/Edge extension let you test the workflow on real documents first.
Cons
- The free plan allows 5 uploads a day, 10 files total and a 300-page cap per PDF, which stalls quickly on serious research.
- There's no desktop or mobile app. Everything routes through a browser or the extension, which is awkward for offline reading.
- Answer quality tracks your prompt as much as the document. Vague questions pull vague answers. Rephrase when the first try misses.
- Automatic website import is limited to a whitelist and arxiv.org, so pasting arbitrary URLs doesn't always work.
Frequently asked questions
It's an AI PDF chat assistant built to ask questions about a document and get cited answers back. You upload a file or web page, ask questions in natural language, and get summaries, extracted details and analysis with citations back to the source. Students, researchers, lawyers and analysts are the main audiences.
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