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Show HN: Chat with your PDF (my first AI side project)

3 points by alfarez ↗ HN
Launched my side project today: https://clarifypdf.com

It's a simple web app to help you clarify long complicated PDFs by asking it questions. How it works:

- Upload a PDF - Ask it questions - It gives you answers, based on the PDF, generated by OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model.

Yes, it's not new, but with mine, there's no subscription of signup. Just a one time $1.99 payment per doc. So yes it is a paid app (OpenAI is not free) but here's a 100% discount code so you can try it out:

PDFS4HN

If you do, I’d love feedback. The product is embarrassingly basic and the prompts need a lot of work, so if you could comment with your feedback below, or email to alfarez@gmail.com, I’d highly appreciate it!

Background:

This is my first AI app which I built as a way to learn AI. Well, I did start learning without a project in mind, but boy the number of rabbit holes you could go deep into is too much. So I thought building something would help me guide my learning. After all, the goal is to build something with the knowledge.

A pleasant side effect with trying to build and launch a product is that I did not just learn the tech, but also all the other important stuff about engineering an AI SaaS, what the UX for an AI backend might look like, and how to talk to the target users of the product without putting them off with all the AI jargon.

Because we all know, at the end of the day, nobody cares about your tech. They just care about how it can help them make money, save money or fix a headache!

Look forward to have you all try it out!

5 comments

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ftxbro
what is the context length and can we get bigger context lengths? if we pay more can we use the gpt-4-32k model?
alfarez
Only on GPT-3.5 at the moment, so token length is only 4097. Still waiting for GPT-4 API access!

But you can upload up to 10MB in file size.

hacky_engineer
Upload up to 10MB file size? How does that work if the context length is only 4097?
hacky_engineer
Also, the signup flow is pretty painful. I have to upload a document, then pay, then go to my email and click on a link, that sends me another link to my email to sign in, then I complete the sign in, and it shows me the order information. And then no where does it let me chat with the robot about my doc...
alfarez
Thanks for that feedback.

That UX flow seems strange because the screen flow should just be: 1) upload, 2) pay, 3) chat. It shouldn't have asked you to check your email for anything.

Please feel free to email me at alfarez at gmail dot com if you're still seeing this issue.

As for handling large files, I'm using a popular method of breaking down the doc into small chunks and then just sending the relevant chunks to the AI.

How to pick the "relevant" chunks? Use embeddings and search for the embeddings that are "semantically closest" to the question being asked.

I wrote up an outline of this process here: https://farez.me/how-to-create-a-chatbot-with-openais-api-a-...