AskYourPDF: Is It Really As Helpful As Its Creators Claim?

Ease of Use: How Convenient Is AskYourPDF?

AskYourPDF isn’t all that different from other AI writing tools. However, if you’ve never used those, it will take you some time to make sense of how AskYourPDF essay writer works. The same is true for its summarizing tool. We wouldn’t say that it has the most confusing website we’ve seen, but it’s not the easiest, either.

AskYourPDF’s creators market it primarily as a tool that can be used for summarizing and extracting information from basically any body of text. In fact, in one of the recent online reviews we’ve seen, the customer explained how they used AskYourPDF to ask questions about their 65-page rental agreement. So, it’s not really surprising that once you open AskYourPDF’s website, most of what you see there has to do with the summarizing tool.

It might take you a bit to even locate the writing tool, and then you will have to spend a while if you’re interested in the different features it has to offer. Frankly, we believe that the website (and the writing tool in particular) could use a UI/UX update. As is, it’s not particularly intuitive or easy to make sense of on the first try.

AskYourPDF Customer Support Team

As subpar as AskYourPDF’s website is in terms of convenience, it’s stellar compared to the customer support team. The AskYourPDF service is new-ish, so this might soon change. For now, though, it’s one of the worst examples of customer support we’ve seen—in the academic writing industry or elsewhere.

First, the only way to contact AskYourPDF’s support is via email. If you’ve ever tried doing it with any product or service, you know how long it sometimes takes to even get a response, not to mention having your issue resolved.

Well, the same is true for AskYourPDF. We had a few straightforward questions about the tool’s abilities, as well as some concerns about data safety. We emailed the support for clarification. The response came three days later, and it was surface-level at best. So, if you’re on a deadline—which students in search of academic writing tools typically are—don’t expect to receive a response from AskYourPDF in time.

AskYourPDF Quality of Writing

Arguably the most important criterion we use when reviewing academic writing services and AI tools is their writing quality. No matter how convenient and affordable they are (by the way, ask your pdf.com is neither of those things), they are completely useless unless you can get a decently-written school assignment from them.

Don’t expect much from AskYourPDF when it comes to the quality of writing. The texts you get from the tool are very obviously AI-generated; you don’t even need an AI content detector to see it. You get a lot of sentences that look like this: “First and foremost, a child-centered approach is essential in early education.”

As you will see if you try using the tool, there’s also a distinct lack of fresh ideas and critical thinking. Even if you rewrite what you get from AskYoutPDF, you will hardly end up with a good essay.

AskYourPDF Pricing: Does It Offer Good Value for Money?

Now, let’s talk about AskYourPDF pricing. Compared to traditional academic writing services, where you’re paying a human writer per page of text, AskYourPDF is very affordable. The most popular monthly package (‘Pro’) will set you back $19.99, and it includes 6,000 pages of text for summaries, unlimited “conversations” (meaning the questions you can ask the tool about the document you’re feeding it), and supposedly unlimited access to customer support. You can also generate as many school assignments as you want.

The cheaper package (‘Permium’) costs $14.99 a month, and the price of the most expensive one (‘Enterprise’) depends on the unique needs of your business. A student definitely doesn’t need the Enterprise package to use AskYourPDF for their studies. In fact, we recommend you start with the basic free package to test the tool before paying anything.

AskYourPDF as a Summarizing Tool: Is It Helpful?

While we found AskYourPDF underwhelming as a writing tool, we do want to acknowledge how convenient it is as a summarizer. The summary you will get won’t be perfect; it will likely miss important chunks of information, and some of the passages won’t make sense to you.

However, overall, it can be immensely helpful, especially if your major involves tons of weekly readings. So, how to use AskYourPDF as a summarizing tool? All you need to do is attach the file you need a summary of—say, a scholarly article. AskYourPDF will offer you a more or less concise summary of its content, and you will save the time you’d otherwise spend reading the entire article.But the features don’t end there. Once you have the summary, you can start asking questions to understand the content better.

AskYourPDF will even offer a few suggestions if you don’t know where to start. Don’t expect the tool to answer everything; we’ve tested it and realized that it often failed to locate an answer in the text, even when we could see it. Still, when you need an article critique due in a few hours, AskYourPDF’s summarizer can be a lifesaver.

Data Safety Concerns When Using AskYourPDF

One of the questions we’ve seen people asking about AskYourPDF is, “Is AskYourPDF safe to use?” The answer is a cautious yes. For some reason, the company dodges it when answering the reviewers on platforms like Trustpilot and Product Hunt, but we’ve read the terms and agreements, and we don’t see any reason for you to worry.

If you’re extra careful about your data, we wouldn’t recommend using AskYourPDF to get a summary of any documents that contain sensitive data about yourself. However, if you need it to get summaries of reading materials for your classes, there’s nothing to worry about. The same is true for AskYourPDF’s writing tool. It isn’t different from any other AI writing tool you’ve already used, including ChatGPT.

Plagiarism Concerns: Are the Texts Generated with AskYourPDF Original?

Alongside the AskYourPDF privacy issues, one of the common concerns is the originality of the texts it generates. Once again, the answer is that it’s not that different from other AI writing tools. If you expect a thoughtful essay with fresh ideas you haven’t already seen a hundred times, you will be disappointed. As with any other AI tool, AskYourPDF merely compiles a text based on thousands of open sources on the topic, so the ideas there are bound to be unoriginal.

That being said, if you worry about outright plagiarism detectable by plagiarism-checking tools, the amount of “plagiarized” content will be close to zero (if any at all). We still recommend running your essay through a plagiarism detector and rewriting it to make it seem more “human,” of course, but there likely won’t be any detectable unoriginal content.

AskYourPDF Pros and Cons

Overall, our verdict on AskYourPDF is as follows: it’s a convenient tool for summarizing long documents—be they class readings, books, or anything else—but it’s not worth the price if you intend to use it for essay writing. There are better AI writing tools out there, and some of them are way cheaper than AskYourPDF.

Pros:

✅ AskYourPDF’s summarizing tool is very convenient if you have a lot of weekly readings to get through ✅ AskYourPDF is way more affordable than traditional academic writing services ✅ AskYourPDF’s AI writing tool has a few helpful features, such as selecting the type of essay you need (narrative, argumentative, etc).

Cons:

❌ The writing quality is quite low; AskYourPDF is not better than other AI writing tools ❌ You can only contact the support team via email, and their responses take a while ❌ Compared to some other AI writing tools, AskYourPDF doesn’t offer good value for money ❌ The website isn’t particularly easy to navigate, especially if you’re interested in AskYourPDF’s writing tool as opposed to the summarizing tool