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Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot is a free tool that can summarize long PDFs for you in minutes. If you ever receive a lengthy document that you don’t have time to read, you can use this guide to get a brief overview.
Claude AI is accessible through a chat interface and API, which means that you can use it in different ways and for different purposes. You can also copy and paste web pages and other content to Claude AI and it will analyze them for you.
How Does Claude AI Work?
Claude lets you upload PDFs and other file types, such as DOCX, CSV, and TXT, to its platform. Then, you can type a command like “Summarize PDF” and get a short and clear summary of PDFs on various topics.
For instance, when Claude was given two different public PDFs of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” it produced two different summaries of the book. Both summaries covered the main events of the story. Claude may generate different summaries for the same PDF with the same command, but they are all correct.
Claude also performed well on other types of content. It gave a neat list of bullet points with revenue, net income, and other financial data from Microsoft’s latest earnings report, all of which were accurate. It saved me the hassle of searching through the earnings report to find the key figures I needed.
You can use Claude AI to get a quick overview of your sources, find relevant information, and generate content for your research paper. You can also use it to generate content for your research paper, such as an introduction, a conclusion, or a paragraph. Just type a command, such as “Write an introduction for my research paper on AI” or “Write a paragraph about the benefits of using Claude AI” and Claude AI will try to create it for you.
You can also ask Claude AI specific questions about your file, such as “What is the main argument of this paper?” or “What are the limitations of this study?” and it will try to answer them. Claude AI will generate a summary or a list of bullet points for your file. You can read it and copy it to your clipboard if you want to use it in your research paper.
Tips and Tricks to Get the Best Summaries from Claude AI
Pro tip: You can use other commands besides “Summarize.” Try phrases like “Tell me the important information in this” and “Recap this for me” to get the main points of the document. The summaries may vary but they will still have valid information.
The free version of Claude has some restrictions. It cannot handle PDFs bigger than 10 megabytes and it has a limit of about five summaries every four hours.
Here are the steps to use Claude AI to summarize the text
- Go to your favorite web browser and visit claude.ai.
- Enter your email and then check your email and enter the verification code from the site.
- Enter your name, agree that you are over 18 years old, and accept the terms of use and privacy policy.
- Enter your phone number and, once more, enter the verification code.
- Three screens with information about Claude will appear. Read and click through them.
- Press the paper clip on the right-hand side of the bar to upload a document.
- Select the PDF or other file type that you want to upload.
- Type a command, such as “Summarize.”
- Press “enter” on your keyboard or press the airplane icon on the search bar.
