Battle of the AI Reading Tools: An In-depth Analysis of New Bing, ChatPDF, Humata, and PDFgear

Last updated on June 6, 2023

Written By Piers Zoew

The customary reading styles outright don’t fit lengthy PDF documents. If only we could read through thousands of articles, guidelines, policies, regulations, prospectuses, and interview transcripts in a matter of seconds and quickly extract the key points or essential information.

And now, we can actually do that. Recently, AI document reading assistants such as New Bing, ChatPDF, Humata, and PDFgear have been introduced to allow users to effortlessly obtain information from documents through natural language conversations and conduct in-depth analysis.

Comparison of New Bing, ChatPDF, Humata, and PDFgear

To help you gain a better understanding of the AI reading tools introduced in this article, we have created a comparison table including precision, summary, citation, translation, rewrite, etc. based on evaluation projects and results.

The table below presents the specific scores and overall scores of New Bing, ChatPDF, Humata, and PDFgear. The testing scores are objectively ensured and are based on the specific performance of each tool, tested with several research papers and informational documents. The specific details are shared in the following content and screenshots.

Rated on a scale of 1 to 5.

* New Bing does not support PDF editing, but Edge supports some editing functions such as adding text, annotations, and highlights.

# Summarizing Features

Some more important demands when reading PDFs include the extraction of useful information or the summarizing of the article.

Therefore, I tested the ability of several different AI tools to summarize the same research titled “Assessment of the Benefits of Extending the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission.”

Question: Summarize the main content of this article.

The summary provided by New Bing was excellent, as it covered the main points that outlined the article and can guide readers to further explorations.

Additionally, you can also choose recommended questions from the lower-right corner.

Summarize Research with New Bing

Humata provided the most comprehensive information. In addition to summarizing the main idea of the entire article, it outlined the main content of each part of the paper.

Summarize Research with Humata

ChatPDF provided a very concise summary with key points. However, it still covered a relatively comprehensive set of information.

Note: When asking questions, you need to mention the name of the paper explicitly in order to receive an effective answer.

Summarize Research with ChatPDF

The summary provided by PDFgear Chatbot was relatively short but highly readable, enabling a quick understanding of the article’s outline.

Summarize the Research with PDFgear

# Precision of Answers

Chatbots’ comprehension of the input text prompts directly influences the accuracy of the answers, which is considered the most important aspect when it comes to reading information using AI. AI reading tools should not make mistakes otherwise they would be meaningless. In terms of data accuracy, only PDFgear can answer all questions correctly.

To test the accuracy of each tool, I uploaded a PDF sample to New Bing, ChatPDF, Humata, and PDFgear, and asked questions about the data in TABLE 2-1: Cost Breakdown (in millions of dollars) for Extending the TRMM Mission to November 2005.

Questions:

√ Tell me the cost of Mission Operations and Guideline for the year 2004.

The data for Mission Operations should be 6.4 million dollars, and for the Guideline, it should be 12.2 million dollars.

The Origin Data in Table

√ Tell me the cost of Science Data Processing in the years 2007 and 2008.

The data for 2007 should be 3.5 million dollars, and for 2008, it should be 1.8 million dollars.

The Origin Data in the PDF

PDFgear quickly and accurately understands my prompts. It provided all the correct answers and citations that accurately located the information in the original table.

The Answers from PDFgear

ChatPDF gently corrects my prompts and attempts to guess my true intentions. However, it fails in the search and the locating of source information. While ChatPDF partially answered the second question correctly, it also stated that there is no reference to the second question.

The Answers from ChatPDF

Humata provided the correct answer for the second question but gave me the wrong location. Furthermore, the readability of the answer is poor.

The Answers from Humata

It seems that New Bing is unable to read the data in the table. It consistently informs me that the current web page context does not contain any information about my question. So disappointed.

The Answers from New Bing

# Citation from Article or Internet

Marking the sources of information can enhance the credibility of an answer and make it easier to gain the trust of users. Additionally, if AI tools can explain professional terms in simple and understandable language, it can significantly reduce the time required for reading highly specialized documents such as legal documents, professional papers, policy files, and historical literature.

New Bing has impressed me! It not only allows browsing of provided content but also performs searches on the Internet and provides relevant links. Furthermore, to ease the strain on the eyes, it presents answers in bullet points. However, New Bing does not provide the exact page reference within my article.

Reference Shown in New Bing

Humata has the ability to extract key information from a range of references and tag serial numbers to enhance readability. It provides overall citation pages at the end of the answer.

However, Humata doesn’t perform well in term explanations. The explanations it provides are too general, and if I don’t read the original text according to the suggested position, it is difficult to quickly understand the term.

Reference Shown in Humata

PDFgear provided detailed information and included overall citation pages at the end of the answer. However, some key points were not covered in the response.

On the positive side, PDFgear uses simple language to explain proprietary terms, which aids in better comprehension.

The Reference Shown in PDFgear

ChatPDF provided an incomplete answer and did not provide citation sources. However, when it comes to answers containing data such as tables, ChatPDF will provide specific reference page numbers.

No Reference is Shown in ChatPDF

# Translation Capability

Translating documents into our familiar language can enhance reading speed and improve our understanding of the content. However, as AI language models, they do not have the ability to directly translate documents.

ChatPDF, New Bing, PDFgear, and Humata cannot directly translate all text into other languages. (To translate the entire PDF, tools such as Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or Google Translator would be more helpful)

However, they do support the translation of specific paragraphs or pages within the content.

When using PDFgear or New Bing for content translation, you need to provide specific content. As a reference, you can use prompts like: “Translate the following content into French (Languages): [insert the detailed content].”

Translate with PDFgear

Translate with New Bing

For New Bing, you can select the texts using the mouse and click “send” in the right chat box to make the tool aware of the content.

Select and Send Content to New Bing

ChatPDF and Humata are more intelligent in this aspect, as you can provide them with specific page numbers or paragraphs for translation.

For example: “Translate page 10 in this article.”

Translate with ChatPDF

Translate with Humata

The translation accuracy of New Bing, ChatPDF, Humata, and PDFgear is relatively high, and there were no significant translation errors observed during the current test.

# Images Reading Ability

To enhance the visual appeal of a PDF, it is common to include images in them. But can AI tools also scan and read these images? I uploaded an article titled “Show Your Work!_ 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered” for verification.

The results were very disappointing. ChatPDF, PDFgear, and Humata were unable to successfully recognize pure images and provide answers.

However, when I asked them to recognize images with text, they were able to read them and summarize the main content.

Replies in PDFgear

Replies in ChatPDF

Replies in Humata

However, New Bing never fails to amaze me! It provides me with satisfactory answers, effortlessly recognizing images and offering detailed explanations. It goes above and beyond by even providing relevant reference links.

Replies in New Bing

Furthermore, if you are interested in generating images, you can try providing specific requirements and receive valuable feedback from New Bing.

# Multi-Language

I conducted tests to evaluate the randomness of each tool’s answers and their language recognition abilities. I asked the same question in English, French, and Spanish to test their ability to recognize different languages:

Can you summarize this research? / Pouvez-vous résumer cette recherche ? / ¿Puedes resumir esta investigación?

I then repeated the request to summarize the entire text twice to assess the randomness of their responses.

New Bing showcased impressive speed in language recognition and response. However, for the same question, it provided two different expressions conveying the same meaning.

Replies in New Bing

PDFgear demonstrates its ability to swiftly recognize languages and provide corresponding answers. Moreover, it offers users diverse responses to the same question, incorporating informative keywords.

Responses on PDFgear

ChatPDF boasts excellent language recognition capabilities, but it falls short in random testing. It consistently provides the exact same answer, lacking variation.

Responses on ChatPDF

Similar to ChatPDF, Humata also provides the same answer for the same question. However, its responses are more comprehensive and encompass a broader range of information.

Nevertheless, it is unclear why Humata provided two different answers to the one question after switching languages sometimes. It could be due to a network issue or some other malfunction.

Responses on Humata

# Rewrite Skill

Rewriting can help prevent repetition and plagiarism. Similarly, when testing with the paper “Assessment of the Benefits of Extending the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission,” PDFgear and Humata perform exceptionally well when I provide the specific content I want to rewrite in my questions.

However, if I solely instruct them to rewrite the content on a particular page number, such as “rewrite the 8th page in this paper,” I do not receive the desired answer. It appears that PDFgear, Humata, and I have different methods of locating article page numbers.

Rewrite on PDFgear

Rewrite on Humata

New Bing also offers a rewriting function, but it requires pasting the rewritten content into the question box to be effective.

Additionally, New Bing provides an automated content selection feature. By simply selecting text with your mouse and clicking the Send icon in the right chat box, you can easily quote the text. This significantly reduces the time spent on copying and pasting text.

Rewrite on New Bing

ChatPDF has a distinctive feature that sets it apart from others. It offers a comparison between the original content and the rewritten version in its answers. This could be attributed to its limitation of not being able to view the original document while providing responses.

Rewrite on ChatPDF

More PDFgear Features

Most AI assistants primarily assist with reading and analyzing PDF files. However, PDFgear stands out as it not only excels as a file reading assistant but also boasts advanced capabilities as a professional PDF editor.

When interacting with the PDFgear Chatbot, you have the option to add instant annotations, text boxes, and draw on your PDF documents for convenient note-taking and document customization.

Furthermore, during the communication, you can underline and highlight important data in PDF using PDFgear. It also offers direct editing capabilities for table files, similar to working with documents in Word.

To ensure document security, it is necessary to set a password for your documents.

Moreover, PDFgear is not only a PDF editor but also a high-quality PDF converter. It supports the conversion of over 30 file types, and there are no limitations on batch conversions in terms of the number or size of files.

Impressively, PDFgear is currently available as a completely free tool, despite its numerous professional and advanced features. If you have any PDF-related needs, you can download the PDFgear Desktop with just one click using the provided button below. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, and iOS platforms.

Conclusion

As AI technology continues to advance, our interaction and utilization of AI-related tools and software are on the rise. This article aims to test and share the commonly used features of ChatPDF, ChatDoc, Humata, and PDFgear.

I was pleasantly surprised by ChatPDF’s ability to summarize articles and provide additional information. The citation function and recommended question options offered by New Bing are exceptional, while Humata’s answers are highly informative. PDFgear demonstrates impressive capabilities in reading and analyzing data.

Overall, ChatPDF and PDFgear stand out with their satisfactory performance. However, the free version of ChatPDF has several limitations that directly impact the user experience. Therefore, I highly recommend PDFgear, which is completely free, as a preferred choice.