Blog  ·  28 July 2026

How to ask questions about a PDF with no internet

Boarding pass scanned, laptop away, four hours in the air, and a forty-page document you were supposed to have read. Every AI tool on your phone needs a connection. Except one kind.

Most ways of "chatting with a PDF" work the same way underneath: the file is uploaded to a server, processed there, and the answers come back over the network. That is fine at your desk. It fails in two situations that come up constantly — when there is no connection, and when the document is not yours to upload.

An AI assistant that runs on the phone itself solves both at once. The document never moves, so there is nothing to upload and no connection to lose.

What "on-device" actually changes

When the assistant runs on your iPhone, the sequence is different in one important way: the file is read locally and the answer is written locally. No copy of the document is created anywhere else. Turning on Airplane Mode does not break it — that is the simplest way to prove to yourself that nothing is being sent.

Practically, that means you can work on:

• a flight, a train through tunnels, or a basement meeting room
• a country where you have no data plan and would rather not pay roaming
• a document covered by a confidentiality agreement, where uploading it is the problem, not the connection

How to do it

1. Set up once, on Wi-Fi. The assistant has to be downloaded to the phone before it can work without a connection. Do this at home, not at the gate.
2. Get the document onto the phone. Save it to Files, or share it into the app from Mail, Safari or any other app.
3. Open "Ask a document" and point it at the PDF, or paste the text you care about.
4. Ask a specific question. "What are the payment terms?" works far better than "summarise this".

Questions that work well

A phone-sized assistant is very good at finding and restating things that are actually in the document:

• "What is the notice period, and who has to give it?"
• "List every date mentioned and what happens on each one."
• "Summarise section 4 in three bullet points."
• "What does this say about cancellation?"
• "Rewrite this paragraph in plain English."

Questions that work badly

It is worth being blunt about this, because the disappointing cases are predictable:

• Anything requiring outside knowledge. "Is this clause normal for our industry?" is not a question about the document.
• Arithmetic across many rows. Long financial tables are where small assistants slip. Check any number you plan to act on.
• Very long documents in one go. Asking about one section at a time gives noticeably better answers than dropping in three hundred pages and hoping.
• Legal or medical advice. It can tell you what a document says. It cannot tell you what to do about it.

The honest summary: treat it as a fast, private reader that never gets bored — not as an expert.

Why not just use a cloud tool with a privacy setting?

You can, and for a lot of documents that is a perfectly reasonable choice. The difference is what you are relying on. With a cloud tool you are relying on a policy: a promise about retention, training and access, which can be changed, misconfigured, or simply misunderstood by the person clicking through the settings. With an assistant that runs on the phone, the document does not leave the device, so there is no policy to rely on.

That distinction matters most for the documents where being wrong is expensive — a client contract, a medical letter, an unreleased set of numbers. We wrote about where that line sits in what you shouldn't paste into a cloud chatbot.

What you need

An iPhone or iPad on iOS 17 or later, and a few minutes of Wi-Fi for the initial setup. More recent phones can run more capable assistants; older ones still handle summarising, rewriting and finding things perfectly well. Will it run on my iPhone? covers how to tell.

Frequently asked questions

Last updated: 28 July 2026