# AI PDF Summarizer App for iPhone and iPad > Summarize PDFs on iPhone or iPad with SumAI. Get a structured AI summary, chat with the document, see it as a mind map and study it with flashcards. - Source: https://getsumai.app/features/pdf-summarizer/ - Last updated: 2026-11-12 - About: SumAI: YouTube & PDF Summary, an AI summarizer app for iPhone and iPad **Long PDF. Short answer.** SumAI is an AI PDF summarizer for iPhone and iPad. Pick a PDF with selectable text and SumAI returns a structured summary in the style and language you choose. Then ask questions about the document, see it as a mind map, and test yourself with a quiz or flashcards. ## Highlights - **Papers, reports, chapters.** Research papers, reports, manuals, lecture notes and textbook chapters all work, as long as the PDF has selectable text. - **Chat with the PDF.** Ask AI answers questions from the text of your document, so you can go from a summary to the exact detail you need. [See Ask AI](https://getsumai.app/features/ask-ai-chat/). - **A study guide in one tap.** The Study Guide style organizes a document into concepts, definitions and takeaways. [Compare the five styles](https://getsumai.app/features/summary-styles/). - **See the structure.** A mind map lays out the document's main idea and subtopics at a glance. [More on mind maps](https://getsumai.app/features/mind-map-generator/). - **Any language out.** Summarize a document written in one language and read the result in another, with 60+ languages to choose from. - **Keep it and export it.** Summaries are saved to your library and can be exported as PDF or Markdown. [Library and export](https://getsumai.app/features/library-and-export/). ## What SumAI does with a PDF Give SumAI a PDF and it reads the text of the document, then writes a summary in the style you chose. From that one summary you also get: - **Ask AI**, to question the document in plain language. - **A mind map** of the main idea and its subtopics. - **A quiz and flashcards** built from the content. - **A place in your library**, with search, favorites and tags. That makes SumAI useful for two different jobs. One is getting the point of a document fast. The other is actually learning what is in it. ## Which PDFs work The requirement is simple: **the PDF needs selectable text.** Most PDFs made on a computer have it: papers downloaded from a journal, reports exported from a word processor, slides saved as PDF, e-book chapters. PDFs made by photographing or scanning paper often do not, because each page is stored as an image. **How to tell:** think about where the file came from. A PDF you exported, downloaded from a publisher or saved from a website is almost always text. A PDF that began as a photo or a scan of paper is the risky kind. If you open it and cannot select or search a single word, it is an image-only scan. One caveat: being able to select a word is a good sign but not proof. Apple's PDF viewer can recognize text in a scanned page on the fly, so a scan can look selectable on an iPhone while the file itself still contains only images. **If it is a scan:** use a scanning or PDF tool that performs OCR (optical character recognition) and saves a searchable PDF, then give that version to SumAI. ## Good uses for a PDF summary - **Research papers.** Read a Study Guide summary to decide whether the paper deserves a full read, then ask about the method or the results. - **Reports and white papers.** Get the findings and recommendations without the forty pages around them. - **Course readings.** Summarize a chapter, then use the flashcards before a seminar or exam. - **Manuals and documentation.** Ask a direct question instead of hunting through the table of contents. ## What a summary cannot do SumAI works from the text of a document. A few honest limits follow from that: - **Charts, figures and images** are not read unless their content also appears in the text. - **Precise details matter.** For numbers, quotations, legal wording or anything you will rely on, check the summary against the original document. - **A summary is a starting point.** It tells you what a document says and where to look. It does not replace reading the parts that matter to your decision. ## PDFs, videos and articles in one library Because SumAI also summarizes [YouTube videos](https://getsumai.app/features/youtube-video-summarizer/) and [web articles](https://getsumai.app/features/web-page-summarizer/), a paper, the lecture that explains it and a blog post about it can sit side by side under the same tag in your library. ## How to summarize a PDF on iPhone or iPad 1. **Start with a PDF that has real text.** PDFs exported from an app or downloaded from a website almost always qualify. If you cannot select or search any words in the PDF, it is a scan (a picture of each page) and needs OCR first. 2. **Pick the PDF in SumAI.** Open SumAI, start a new summary and choose the PDF from your files. 3. **Choose a style and a language.** Pick TL;DR, Standard, Detailed, Study Guide or Chapters, and the language you want the summary in. 4. **Read, then go deeper.** Read the summary, ask questions with Ask AI, open the mind map, or run the quiz and flashcards. ## Frequently asked questions ### Can SumAI summarize scanned PDFs? SumAI needs a PDF with selectable text. A scan that is only a picture of each page has no text to read. If you cannot select or search any words in the PDF, it is an image-only scan: run it through an OCR tool that saves a searchable PDF first, then give that version to SumAI. ### Can I chat with a PDF in SumAI? Yes. After SumAI summarizes a PDF you can use Ask AI to ask questions about it in plain language. Answers come from the text of the document. ### Can SumAI summarize a PDF in another language? Yes. You choose the language of the summary yourself, from more than 60 languages, whatever language the PDF is written in. ### What kinds of PDFs work best? Text-heavy documents work best: research papers, reports, articles, manuals, notes and book chapters. Information that exists only in images, charts or scanned pages is not part of the text SumAI reads. ### Can I turn a PDF into flashcards? Yes. SumAI generates a quiz and flashcards from every summary, including summaries of PDFs. ### Is there a PDF summarizer for iPad? Yes. SumAI is a universal app for iPhone and iPad, and it requires iPadOS 16.0 or later on iPad.