Hello,
Hope everyone is well.
I was wondering if there are plans to integrate some AI features, specially that some competitors already have.
Thanks for your question, @Fr_David_Elias. We are exploring how generative AI models can improve Paperpile, so if you have suggestions or ideas for how AI would improve or speed up your reference management, let us know.
thank you for getting back so quick. Comes to mind 2 main functions that I would like to see. 1) chat with/summarize a PDF, of course with academics that will not be enough, most probably the whole article/paper will be read eventually. But because sometimes the abstracts are too general, such a function will be really helpful, specially that some/many article don’t have conclusion either. I know Papers already implemented something like that.
2) Scite.ai (I think that’s the name) has a decent feature, but not well implemented. It shows excerpts from the articles that are citing the article of interest. So it shows the number of citation, and show excerpts of these citations. Again, the implementation is far from perfect, but the idea is good.
I guess both features have to do with summarizing so I don’t have to spend so much time reading an article to find nothing.
I know that this might be stepping outside a “reference manager” function, but …
thank you
If you are going to incorporate AI features, there MUST be a button to turn those features completely off and out of view. Some disciplines (such as mine) are very anti-AI especially for the work of summary, which is an important cognitive skill. Me and my colleagues would stop using Paperpile if those features were not able to be hidden or removed.
@suzanne and @Kelly_Rafferty Of course, there are also some publishers who require that the author would disclose the use of AI. I haven’t used any in my publications, but I started to notice that other software have already implemented some of these features. And I agree, the implementation should be done carefully. It seems like it is popping up every where.
In my opinion, it should at least
- Provide a way to chat with the paper, making questions and providing grounded answers (maybe also referencing from what part of the paper the answer was got)
- Provide a way to search papers within the library with natural language
- Answer questions based on the user’s papers (something like Elicit, but confined to the user’s library)
I think these three features would provide 90% of the value already.
I’m leaving this response in case it might be helpful.
I recently came across a Chrome extension called the AI PDF reader “Moonlight,” and it seems to offer the features you’re looking for. It utilizes generative AI to provide summarization, automatic highlighting, explanations of specific figures, and translation into other languages. What I find most useful is that clicking on figures or references within the text brings up a small window displaying the figure—and it offers a one-click toggle on/off feature.
While Moonlight isn’t the best when it comes to bibliography management, it excels as a PDF reader. It would be great if Paperpile could integrate AI to enhance its reader functionality with similar features.