Paperpile’s first AI-native integration is now available in beta: seamlessly send PDFs to ChatGPT, NotebookLM or any supported AI assistant.
The new feature, called Ask AI, can help you more quickly find the key quotation or data point that unlocks the next step in your research. Read on to learn how to gain new insights from your PDFs organized in Paperpile.
Share PDFs with your assistant of choice
To use Ask AI, take one or more PDFs from your library, choose a prompt, and start a thread with your preferred AI assistant:
Paperpile will send your full-text PDF and selected prompt to the AI assistant. From there you can ask follow-up questions, add additional papers, or click to view quotes in the source full-text PDF.
Ask AI is available starting today for all Paperpile users. Turn it on by visiting Settings > AI integrations in Paperpile.
Feature highlights
Send 10 PDFs at a time to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Copilot:
Choose from a curated library of prompts tuned to real-world research workflows:
Quickly locate quotes and citations in the source PDF and save as a highlight:
Use the AI features you already pay for with your existing account and subscription:
Explore big ideas with NotebookLM & Paperpile
At some point in any research project you’ll need to read many papers and figure out what to do next.
To support cross-study brainstorming, Paperpile supports prompting with as many PDFs as each underlying assistant can handle.
NotebookLM supports 50 PDFs per notebook on the free plan, and up to 600 PDFs on the highest tier (source). ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude support up to 10 PDFs per thread.
Science that speaks your language
Ask AI will always respond in the language you’ve selected for your AI assistant. This means you get fluent explanations and discussions in your native language, no matter the original language of the paper:
Always bringing you back to the source
AI should do more than give you a wall of text to read; it should launch you into the original papers so you can learn and think deeply yourself.
That’s why Paperpile creates links between AI outputs and your PDF full-text.
Click the button to view the quote in context. Save as a highlight, or add a note to your library for later.
Pay less, use the best models
With institutions and employers increasingly providing access to AI products like Claude or Gemini, we heard from many users that paying extra for a Paperpile-specific AI might feel hard to justify.
So we designed this integration to allow you to bring your own subscription and leverage the full power of your preferred AI assistant.
This means you always have access to the cutting-edge product features, the most powerful models, and your existing personal or institutional subscription.
You remain in control
You can always opt out of Ask AI. Or, a single click will turn off all AI-powered Paperpile features if that’s your preference:
Administrators of group licenses and enterprise accounts can control access to Ask AI for their team. For example, you can restrict access to a specific AI assistant if company policy requires it. Visit the settings page for your Paperpile team account to make changes.
What’s next
Our ultimate goal is to build AI-assisted personal research workflows that solve problems facing researchers every day. For example:
- What if you had tools to organize and annotate the overwhelming amount of academic literature relevant to your work?
- What if you could automatically collect data from every new paper in your field—in a way that’s precisely tuned to your active research questions?
Building toward this vision is a long-term project. Luckily, important pieces of the puzzle are already falling into place.
In the near term, our team will be focused on connecting Paperpile more deeply to the AI products where researchers increasingly spend their time, including agent-based tools like Claude Code. This will unlock advanced workflows, such as:
- Find important papers with intuitive AI-powered deep search.
- Ask detailed research questions of your full-text library: extract structured data, answer detailed questions, or synthesize hundreds of papers at a time.
- Automatically organize your library with intelligent label and folder management.
Progress on these features will be interleaved with our broader roadmap. This includes a major refresh of the Google Docs and Word citation plugins, plus brand-new iOS and Android apps.
Feedback is welcome!
If you have ideas about Ask AI or the future of Paperpile and AI tools in research, don’t hesitate to get in touch:
- Email greg@paperpile.com with ideas
- Visit our forum
- Contact Paperpile Support