PDF Chatbot

Upload a document and ask it questions. The bot answers from the contents and cites where it found each answer.

The problem

People paste giant documents into a chatbot and hit length limits, or worse, the model makes things up. They want answers grounded in their document, with a pointer to the exact passage so they can trust it.

Why now

Retrieval (find the relevant chunks, then answer only from those) is now a well-trodden pattern, and embedding models are cheap. A focused “chat with this PDF” tool beats a general chatbot for this one job.

The smallest version that’s useful

Drop one PDF, the app splits it into chunks, finds the few most relevant to your question, and asks the model to answer using only those, with the source quote shown underneath. One document, one session, no account.

What’s hard

Two things make or break it: chunking (split on meaning, not arbitrary character counts) and citations (show the passage, or users won’t trust it). Cost creeps up with big docs, cap pages or charge by usage.

Build it with

Extend the Build an AI Chatbot workflow: add a retrieval step before the model call. Add Add Authentication when you want to save document libraries per user.