Summarizing a PDF can be challenging, even for those who read fast. Such a task demand brain power and time, but AI has changed the game. If you use social media, you must have known the power and impact of AI, a lot of digital products has added this feature, including photo editor, video editor and PDF editor. It is easy to see why, because it does the job automatically and smartly, and the most import is, it cuts cost on time, human resource and money substantially.
There are a lot of AI PDF summarizer on the market, and maybe it is hard for you to know which ones are great and which ones are perfect for your use. We tested all the AI PDF summarizing tools online and offline, and will list all the noticeable differences in this guide for you to skip those sheerly waste your time.
Does Adobe Acrobat Have AI PDF Summarizer?
NO!
Adobe Acrobat is doubtlessly the biggest name in PDF editors with a lot of good reasons. Adobe AI has been available for some time, most of Adobe products are powered with AI, so is Acrobat. It uses AI to reflow text and match the layout, so you can edit PDF in it without losing formatting, it uses AI to recognize texts, prepare forms, sign and submit, compare, etc. But pitiful, it cannot summarize PDFs with AI, it can only summarize comments only.
But no worries, there are 10+ AI PDF summarizers to opt for.
1. Foxit
While Foxit doesn’t reproduce Acrobat’s layout and interface, it is as powerful as Acrobat, by giving similar tools and options in PDF editing. It started to add AI features 2021 and has made a progress to equip itself with all common AI tools you can find in other editors. Right now, Foxit supports AI summarize, translate, revise and rewrite. Like any other AI PDF tools, it may feels like a magic sometimes, and cannot do the work the other times.
The results from its AI PDF summarizer, overall, are accurate for simple files. And it supports summarizing the whole document or just some texts.
Platform: Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android,
Pros: rich editing features, great for collaboration and review workflow, fast and reliable, easy to use
Cons: high price
Accuracy for PDF summarization: high
Price: starting from $109.99/year
2. UPDF
UPDF is quite new, comparing with the majority of PDF editors that have a long history. But the UPDF team reacts very sharply to AI and has added full AI to its editor. With the app, you can summarize, translate, explain and write using AI.
An added plus about this AI PDF summarizer is that it allows you to summarize the whole document or just supplied texts, within 30 seconds.
Platform: Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, Cloud
Pros: a lot of editing features, batch process PDFs
Cons: not as powerful as Acrobat or Foxit in editing and collaboration
Accuracy for PDF summarization: high
Price: starting from $39.99/lifetime
3. PDFgear
The best thing about PDFgear as an AI-powered PDF platform is its rich tool sets to interact and edit a PDF for free. It introduces PDFgear Copilot, helping users to chat with PDFs and let them perform the task automatically, to summarize and ask from a PDF, to review and revise errors, etc.
PDF users who are looking for an all-in-one free solution for PDF can really benefit from this program. It gets a ton of bells and whistles, you can edit, convert, sign, annotate, compress, ocr, organize, merge, fill, split, unlock, highlight and so on. And it has a full presence across different platforms, from macOS, Windows to iOS.
Platform: Mac, Windows, iPhone
Pros: easy to use, rich AI tools
Cons: basic editing feature only
Accuracy for PDF summarization: high
Price: free to use
4. PDFelement
PDFelement is a one-stop PDF solution for all individual and businesses of all sizes. It easily edit, convert, sign and handle your PDFs, saving you time and effort creating professional documents.
It now has 8 AI PDF tools available summarize, chat, rewrite, proofread, translate, bookmark, explain and PDF to markdown, giving you a huge amount of control over various AI tasks.
Platform: Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, Cloud
Pros: rich AI tools, rich editing features, available on all platforms
Cons: cannot maintain original formatting in all files
Accuracy for PDF summarization: high
Price: starting from $79.99/year
5. Smallpdf
Unlike Foxit, Smallpdf is web-based, which means anyone with access to internet can use it and launch it in a browser. It also means you can use its other services for free, including compress, convert, merge, edit, sign and fill.
When you summarize a PDF with Smallpdf AI, it gives the summary in no time and you can ask anything about the PDF. You can use Smallpdf to summarize up to 50MB and 50000 words for free, if you want more, you can use its credit system to get more services.
Unfortunately, Smallpdf might let you down by one major quirk: summary is not as brief and accurate as others.
Platform: web
Pros: summarize and chat with PDFs quickly
Cons: limited AI tools, cannot edit PDF texts, limited access to services
Accuracy for PDF summarization: accurate
Price: free ~$9/month
6. Chatpdf
Chatpdf is a user-friendly online platform for both beginners and professionals seeking to chat with a PDF and ask anything about it easily. It helps you get key points from a lengthy PDF document without investing money in a subscription.
Also, it saves and exports the chat history with your PDF document.
Platform: web
Pros: ask anything about the PDF easily and quickly
Cons: sign in to save chat history, limited PDFs/questions/pages/folders, up to 32MB-PDF for free
Accuracy for PDF summarization: accurate
Price: free ~$7/month
7. ASKYOURPDF
If you burn through your free trial too quickly on Smallpdf, there are other web tools as an alternative. ASKYOURPDF is one of them. The site is very intuitive and can produce results quickly. All you have to do is upload the file and summarize, also you can ask anything from the PDF using this AI tool, it helps explaining images as well.
Platform: web
Pros: summarize, ask anything with PDFs, support PDF, TXT, PPT, PPTX, EPUB and RTF
Cons: limited conversions for free
Accuracy for PDF summarization: medium
Price: free ~$19.99/month
8. Knowt
Knowt combines the power of flashcards making and file summarizing with AI. You can use this unique AI tool to create and turn flashcards into test-like environment, to transform notes to flashcards.
Also, you can use this tool to summarize a PDF, PPT, even a video, so you can read faster on a file or a video, especially you are running out of time to submit a report, etc.
Platform: web
Pros: rich AI tools, summarize PDF, PPT, spreadsheet, video and note, integrate with Google Drive
Cons: sign in to summarize a file, slow, pop-up ads
Accuracy for PDF summarization: medium
Price: free ~$9.99/month
9. Hypotenuse AI
Hypotenuse AI is one of the top AI content writer for SEO teams and E commerce brands. This tool lets you create unique and polished text or image contents, for Ads, social media, website, newsletter, comments and so on.
It has an online AI PDF summarizer too. You upload your PDF file, and the tool will generate an accurate summary. You can use this tool free for 7 days, past that period, you have to pay $15 per 115 credits.
Platform: web
Pros: great for seo and e-commerce blog writing, summarize PDF and inserted texts
Cons: 7 day free trial, you have to log in to upload a PDF file
Accuracy for PDF summarization: accurate
Price: free ~$49/month
10. HiPDF
While HiPDF is known for being a PDF converting tool, it has now created 4 AI PDF tools: summarizer, reader, chatbot, AI content detector. These tool can be used for free, no credit card is required to get the AI output.
You can also expect its AI resume scanner in the near future.
Platform: web
Pros: rich AI tools, detect AI contents, easy to use, support 10+ file languages
Cons: need to sign up and subscribe to get full features
Accuracy for PDF summarization: medium
Price: free ~$5.99/month
11. HIX.AI
HIX AI is an unique AI tool that you can use to generate contents or make existing ones better. With Hix.ai, you can write, rewrite, chat, check error, and summarize PDF or Youtube videos, in different modes that are suitable for your workspace.
This tool is a comprehensive option if you want to create blog posts, in English and other 50+ languages.
Platform: web
Pros: rich AI tools to write blogs, ads, email, academic articles and so on, summarize in paragraph or bullet points
Cons: Summarize up to 3000 words for free
Accuracy for PDF summarization: medium
Price: free ~$39.99/month
What is the best AI PDF summarizer?
Considering the accuracy and uniqueness of a summary result, I would pick Foxit or Smallpdf personally, also for the reason that they provides a lot editing features. Online AI PDF summarizers are good as well, but to have an accurate and better experience, we might have to pay in the end.