What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #85

💡Chatting With Big PDFs

Talk in the US lately has been centered on the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Everyone has opinions about it, but few have read it. AI to the rescue!

There are a couple PDF plugins for ChatGPT right now - I’m having good luck with “AskYourPDF”. If you’re a ChatGPT Plus user ($20/mo), all you need to do is add the plugin to a conversation, no signup required.

I point it to the URL of a PDF of the bill, and ask it to outline anything that may be relevant to my tax clients:

#4 mentioned IRS funding so I got angry and asked for more information:

In testing, the responses have been very accurate. GPT-4 does a much better job of sticking to a specific context & not hallucinating.

These apps today will work best with narrative text. Assume it will generally be blind to tables & worksheets, and its why it works well on narrative text, but less so on something visual. For example a tax return, semantically, makes no sense. But a transcript, or anything that’s just text is suited for this.

Long-term, enriched context will make this more powerful. For example, an IRS publication that’s augmented with a semantic explanation of a worksheet. Or a service that takes a tax return PDF, and layers in semantic explanations of the amounts in each field.

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