A 60-page report, a dense contract, a manual you need one answer from — sometimes you don’t want to read a PDF, you want to interrogate it. AI can do that: hand it the document and get the key points, or ask questions in plain language and get answers drawn straight from the text. Ream has two tools for this — Summarize and Chat — and because they work differently from everything else on the site, this guide is as much about how they handle your document as how to use them.
The one honest caveat: these use the cloud
Almost every tool on Ream runs entirely on your device. Summarize and Chat are the exception, and we’d rather be upfront than bury it. A large language model can’t run in your browser at good quality, so to produce a summary or answer, the text of your PDF (not the file itself) is sent over an encrypted connection to our AI provider, Anthropic — and only after you tick a consent box. It’s processed and returned, not stored, and not used to train the model; Anthropic is named as a sub-processor in our Privacy Policy. If a document is too sensitive to share with a third-party service, use the on-device tools instead — that’s the honest rule of thumb. For the wider privacy picture, see are online PDF tools safe?
How to summarize a PDF
Summarize PDF gives you the gist of a long document:
- Add your PDF. The text is read in your browser.
- Agree and choose a length — tick the consent box and pick a short overview or a detailed, sectioned summary.
- Read the summary on the page; copy it or save it as text.
If your PDF is a scan with no text, Ream runs OCR on it first (on our server, free) so there’s text to summarize — so scans work too, with no extra step.
How to chat with a PDF
Chat with PDF lets you ask questions instead of reading: “What’s the notice period?”, “What were the 2023 figures?”, “Summarise section 4.” Load the PDF, consent, and ask — it answers using only your document, and if something isn’t in there it says so rather than guessing. The conversation stays in your browser; keep asking follow-ups to narrow things down.
Getting good results
Ask specific questions (“What is the total in the summary table?”) rather than vague ones, and follow up to refine. Treat the output as a fast, helpful starting point, not gospel — AI can miss nuance, so check anything important against the source. And if you only need the raw words rather than an interpretation, PDF to Text extracts them on-device with nothing sent anywhere.
Scanned document? Both tools handle it — a scan is OCR’d automatically first so there’s text to work with. If you’ll reuse that searchable version elsewhere, our guide on making a scanned PDF searchable covers doing the OCR step yourself.
Frequently asked questions
Does this send my document somewhere? Yes — unlike our other tools, Summarize and Chat send the PDF’s text (not the file) to our AI provider, Anthropic, after you tick consent. It’s not stored and not used to train the model.
Is it private like the rest of Ream? These two are the exception — they use a cloud AI. Every other tool runs on your device. Don’t use these for text you can’t share with a third-party service.
Which AI does it use? Anthropic’s Claude, named as a sub-processor in our Privacy Policy. Your text isn’t used to train it.
Does it work on scanned PDFs? Yes — a scan is run through OCR automatically first (free), then summarized or chatted with.
Should I use Summarize or Chat? Summarize for a one-time overview of the whole document; Chat to ask specific questions and follow up.
Can I trust the answers? They’re grounded in your document and a great starting point, but AI can miss nuance — verify anything important against the source.
Is it free? Yes — free and no watermark, with a fair-use hourly limit.
AI turns a long PDF into something you can question instead of wade through — Summarize for the overview, Chat for the details. Just remember they’re the one corner of Ream that uses the cloud: opt-in, text-only, never stored — and for anything you can’t share, the on-device tools are right there.
