The 7 Best Apps to Chat With Your Books

Imagine engaging in a conversation with the author of your favorite non-fiction book, or effortlessly returning to the most intriguing sections without having made any highlights or bookmarks. With the advent of AI, this is not as far-fetched as it sounds.

There are several apps that use AI to help you interact with your books. The primary uses include querying your book for a deeper understanding of its content and effortlessly locating specific quotes or sections.

In this blog post we compare 6 of them. We'll also evaluate them based on the diversity of file types supported and the affordability of their subscription models.

AI Quote Finder

AI Quote Finder is a web app that uses AI to help you to find specific parts of your favorite books in seconds. You can also use it to understand books with the AI chat feature. It supports EPUB and PDF files. This flexibility ensures that whether you're a fan of EPUB or PDF formats, your entire library remains accessible.

With a generous free plan and only $10 for unlimited access, it is the cheapest option while solving for all major use cases.

Book GPT

Book GPT allows you to chat with your books. It's completely open source but requires you to sign up to several other services to get an API key to use it. It also doesn't support EPUB files.

Colab Notebook

Google Colab is a product by Google that lets you run Python scripts and gives you access to a certain amount of free computing power and storage. People have created scripts to embed books and make them searchable. The problems with this solution are that: 1. the file is not stored. After you close the tab the file is deleted. 2. Each time you want to run the script you have to manually trigger the execution of each sub-process (run each cell of the notebook) which takes a lot of time. Besides these points it also seems to be broken right now.

LightPDF

LightPDF analyzes PDFs and allows you to search for keywords. Its downside is that on the free plan you can only "analyze" PDFs and only documents up to 100 pages. The paid plan is $29.99 per month.

ChatGPT

If you pay $20 per month you can get access to ChatGPT's file upload feature. Open AI states that ChatGPT's supports "All common file extensions for text files, spreadsheets, presentations, and documents". When uploading EPUBs it seems to try to use the code interpreter to write a script to extract the text from the EPUB but fails miserably.

We also tried uploading the PDF of the book "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel but ChatGPT failed to find any information about our search query (how human intelligence compares to machine intelligence) even though Thiel wrote an entire chapter on that topic (Chapter 12 "Man and Machine"). Once we told it about this chapter it still failed to link to the section.

Trying this again it seems to have found a source but clicking on the source link just downloads the original PDF instead of linking to a specific section.

Conclusion

In concluding our journey through innovative apps that enhance our interaction with books, it's evident that AI has transformed how we engage with literature. Among the impressive options, AI Quote Finder shines as the superior choice. Its affordability and broad file format support make it accessible and practical for a wide audience. Notably, its advanced semantic search capability allows users to dive deep into their favorite texts, uncovering insights and finding passages with ease.

AI Quote Finder stands out by not only making literature more accessible but also by enriching our reading experience through intelligent, nuanced conversations with our books. In this new era of literary exploration, AI Quote Finder is a beacon for avid readers seeking a deeper connection with their reading material.