AI Assistant: Frequently Asked Questions

The ReadCube AI Assistant gives users access to powerful AI functionality that helps them enhance research efficiency by providing real-time, in-depth analysis, summarization, and contextual understanding of research literature.

With the AI Assistant, you can:

• Chat with a PDF: Dive deeper into individual documents by extracting insights, summarizing content, and asking natural language questions within any PDF in your library.
• Chat with your Library: Analyze and synthesize knowledge across multiple selected articles, helping you find connections, patterns, and themes quickly.
• Get AI Summaries: Automatically receive AI-generated summaries of new library additions in your inbox, allowing you to quickly grasp their relevance.
  

The AI Assistant uses generative AI to analyze your question and attempts to identify an answer within the context of the currently opened PDF or the group of selected articles in your library. It leverages the general knowledge stored within large language models with the specific context of the research at hand to interpret and answer your questions.

Our goal is to accelerate the pace of research without compromising the integrity of scholarly consumption and review. There are a number of ways the AI Assistant can do this, including and not limited to:

• Content Summarization: helping extract key insights from papers.
• Deep-dive Queries: ask specific questions about an article’s contents
• Terminology Explanation: help explain complex academic jargon or specific terminology used in the article
• Contextualized Information: provide additional background context on a topic, to help grasp the implications of the research
• Identify Research Gaps: analyze the paper to identify possible areas for future research
• Comprehension Bridges: every research team has varying degrees of proficiency for academic language or the actual language of a given paper; this can make papers more understandable, and digestible, to a wider audience
• Multilingual capability: users can analyze the paper in different languages

1. Open your PDF: Launch any PDF from your ReadCube library.
2. Start a chat: Click the AI Assistant icon in the top left corner to open the chat window.
3. Ask questions: Type prompts like “Summarize the methods section” or “What are the main findings?” The AI will reply with accurate, source-based answers.
4. See where answers come from: Click the arrow icon to jump directly to the section of the PDF the AI referenced.
5. Ask about specific figures or tables: Use the camera icon to capture a figure, table, or section of the article. You can then ask the AI detailed questions about the screenshot.

Watch this video to learn how to chat with a PDF:

1. Select articles: Hold down the ‘Command’ key and select up to 20 articles with PDFs in your library 
2. Open the AI Assistant: Once your articles are selected, right click and select the Ask AI Assistant -> Chat with Papers
3. Ask questions: Enter your research questions into the chat interface, such as, “What are the main conclusions in these papers?” or “Compare the methodologies used.” 
4. See where answers come from: Click the arrow icon to jump directly to the section of the PDF the AI referenced.

Watch this video to learn how to chat with a library:

1. Click the gear icon next to your library. 
2. Select ‘Settings.’ 
3. Enable the AI Email Alerts option. 
4. Choose how often you want to receive notifications. 
5. Check the box to include ‘AI Summaries.’ 
6. Use the suggested prompt or create your own. 
7. Save the alert.

Watch this video to learn how to set up AI summary email alerts:

We have designed our AI Assistant to focus on answering specific questions contained within the opened research paper, rather than relying on broad knowledge trained within large language models. This can help mitigate the probability of hallucinations, but there is always the possibility the AI may misinterpret a question or fail to extract the correct context. Accuracy may also vary depending on the topic. We encourage you to refer back to the full text to verify answers, and in many cases our AI Assistant will point you to the specific paragraphs from which an answer was obtained.

No, the AI Assistant utilizes the full text of PDFs stored in your own ReadCube library. If you do not have a copy of the PDF, then the AI Assistant would not have access to text for analysis.

Yes, the AI Assistant is capable of working with texts in other languages as well as answering questions in other languages.

The AI Assistant was not designed to write articles, but rather to help answer questions within existing articles.

Please use the built-in app feedback buttons to share feedback with the team or fill out this form.

Regenerate Answer attempts a different approach to answer your question. For example, it may modify the context to focus on your most recent question. We encourage you to use the feedback buttons to indicate if a regenerated answer is better or worse.

The AI Assistant is available in the web app and the latest desktop app. The only AI Assistant functionality currently available in the mobile app is Chat with a PDF.

Please note that if you have not updated to the latest version of the desktop app the AI functionality will not be available. To update, go to the Tools page in ReadCube.