Source: Google
Google Pinpoint: AI research across your own documents
A free Google tool that uses artificial intelligence to analyse, transcribe and search thousands of your own documents, from PDFs and photos to audio.
Pinpoint began as a research tool for journalists and news organisations, and anyone can now use it for free. Google describes it as a private, “supercharged” Google search for your own files.
You work with “collections”, a kind of project folder where you can upload up to 200,000 documents at once: PDFs, images, audio, websites, Word documents and more. Pinpoint processes them with OCR and AI, handwriting included, and transcribes audio in several languages.
It also automatically extracts the names of people, organisations and places that appear and gathers them in a side index. You can search for a term and see which pages it appears on, including synonyms and grammatical variants, or ask questions and get answers based on what you uploaded.
It is useful, for example, for transcribing hours of interviews and finding an exact quote, cross-referencing hundreds of academic papers or historical documents to see which authors or organisations recur, drawing conclusions from dozens of financial reports or regulations without reading them in full, or digitising handwritten notes and old letters into a searchable archive.