Docly practical guide
Summarise a PDF and Ask Document Questions
AI can get you to the key points of a long report quickly, but what it produces is an assistant draft. For contracts, medical, legal and financial documents, checking critical details against the source page is a required step rather than an optional one.
Create a useful PDF summary
Add the document and choose a short or a detailed result. A short summary answers whether the document is about what you think and whether it is worth reading in full. A detailed summary works through the document with headings, so you come away knowing its structure.
A summary that is actually useful separates five things: the purpose, the main findings, the dates, who is responsible for what, and what remains unresolved. For very long documents, summarising sections first and then asking for an overall synthesis loses less detail than summarising everything at once.
Ask effective questions
Vague questions produce vague answers. Instead of asking what a document says, ask what the delivery date is, ask for each party's obligations as a list, or ask for the risks in section three with page references.
State the output format you want as well: a table, a bullet list, a chronology in date order. Constrain the scope too, because telling the tool to look only at the appendices or to assess only the payment terms filters out material from unrelated parts of the document.
Build the habit of verifying
Open the cited pages and compare dates, amounts, percentages, conditions and exceptions against the original text. Exception clauses deserve particular attention: the main rule can be summarised accurately while the attached qualifications that limit it drop out.
Do not use information presented as certain when it does not appear in the document. The absence of something is information too: noting that a contract contains no termination clause is far more valuable than reading an invented one.
Where it helps and where it does not
It is fast and effective for triaging long reports, deciding whether a paper is relevant to your work, locating a specific clause in a lengthy agreement and getting oriented in unfamiliar technical documentation.
It is not a record that replaces the document. For anything you will sign, submit to an institution, or rely on legally, the final reading remains yours. Scanned documents need OCR first, because without a text layer there is nothing for the tool to read.
Quick checklist
- ✓Specify the desired output format in each question.
- ✓Verify dates, amounts and exception clauses on the source page.
- ✓Do not treat a summary as the official record.
- ✓Run OCR on scanned documents first.
Tools in this guide
Frequently asked questions
Is an AI PDF summary reliable?
It is useful for initial review, but critical decisions should be checked against the source document.
What can I ask a PDF?
Ask targeted questions about dates, parties, obligations, findings, risks and specific sections.