How to use Copilot to summarize PDF

In the age of information overload, it can be troublesome to go through painstakingly long PDFs or when time is of the essence. With the ever-growing state of LLMs, skimming through a PDF has been utterly simplified. Now, you can generate a quick, comprehensive summary of PDFs with the click of a button. In this article, we will learn how to use Copilot to summarize PDFs.

What information does Copilot require to summarize a PDF?

To summarize a PDF, the Copilot needs to be able to access its text. This means the PDF must have selectable text, and scanned documents won’t work. Copilot doesn’t require any additional context or input from the user.

The quality of the summary depends on how comprehensive, well-formatted, and recognizable the text from the PDF is. To summarize a PDF with Copilot, two prerequisites are using only the Microsoft Edge browser and documents containing selectable text.

How to use Copilot to Summarize PDF

Copilot can summarize PDFs, documents, and web content from your browser. Here’s how to use it:

• To summarize a PDF, open it in Microsoft Edge, right-click the PDF in File Explorer, then expand the Open with option, and open it in Microsoft Edge.

• Bring up the Copilot tab by clicking the Copilot icon from the top right corner.
• You will automatically see the prompt to summarize the document. Click on it.
• You can also select various styles, including Creative, Balanced, and Precise.

• Once selected, click the prompt, and Copilot will summarize the PDF.

How to Interact with the PDF data using CoPilot

After summarizing the PDF, you can ask any follow-up questions to gain more insights into the document. Copilot intelligently suggests some follow up questions, you can interact with content of the document, ask it to elaborate on certain sections of the document, or suggest imporvements.

In our testing, we’ve found that while Copilot generates summaries of small documents and PDFs, ideally around 20-40 pages, well and gives detailed answers to follow-up questions, it does not work well with larger documents, like books.

It even references specific pages for shorter documents, but the same is mainly absent when tried on more significant documents.

For this, we tried a 150-page book (within the context length of 128k tokens for GPT4 Turbo or 240 pages of 400 words each). The results returned by Copilot were either in part from the Internet or were just very surface-level descriptions, part of which were also hallucinated by the AI.

In conclusion, Copilot AI can be used to summarize PDFs, but for precision, try to keep them under 50 pages (you can split the PDF) and never take the results as is; always fact-check the answers.

We hope you found the article helpful and learned to summarize PDFs using Copilot.

Can I upload documents To Copilot Pro?

You cannot directly upload documents to Copilot Pro like ChatGPT. Still, you can open the documents in the Microsoft Edge browser on PC and as Copilot to summarize, analyze, or answer questions related to the document. The feature can only be used in Microsoft Edge for Windows PCs, unlike ChatGPT.

Does Copilot Pro have extensions like ChatGPT Pro?

Copilot Pro does not have extensions like ChatGPT Pro. It only has a few plugins and custom GPTs designed for specific purposes, but it does not come with the functionality of using third-party extensions or having an extension store like ChatGPT. However, Copilot Pro extends the functionality of Copilot to all Microsoft products, such as MS Office, OneDrive, Office 365, and others.