I've been using Paperguide since I purchased it via AppSumo on the 31st of October. I would like to add some observations from using it. I'm on Tier 2.

I've also got Afforial, Socrates, IKI, and NotebookLM to compare against. My usage is for personal interests in health and medical, and professional services work research across technology and training.

Overall, it's a product with potential, and I hope it will develop into a well-rounded product in the future. However, I would like to comment on some user interface and workflow issues that cause a lot of friction in its use.

Starting with the home icon.

If you do an AI search, this is fine and brings up relevant papers with citations. However, at this point, there is really nowhere to go with it since it becomes a chat. I wasn't able to see a way to transfer this information, along with the citations and links, into a document. I could copy the result into a blank document, but then there weren't any linked citations. Also, the references section in the chat wasn't transferable.

The workaround would be to copy the result to a new document, then go back to the chat, add the citations, then back to the document, and then manually highlight each one in the document and then link them from the references manager side panel.

This then led me to the next shortcoming. I like to put my references in subfolders in the reference manager. My papers were in a subfolder. But there was no way to select that subfolder in the references manager subpanel of the writer. So I could only work from a main folder. So the work around was to move the paper into the first level folder above, go back to the document, refesh the view, then seen the paper. I can then use it to cite a reference. This is very problematic if you have a lot of documents to scroll through.

Now with a competitive product called Afforial, its document writer can open its, research assistant, and show me my previous conversations. I can then choose the response and add it to the document with references included. These references don’t even have to be added to my reference library. However, it does give an option to do this when hovering over the citation.

The reference icon.

I've noticed that some documents fail to upload and process, whereas I know that in other systems like Afforial, Socrates, IKI, and NotebookLM, the same file is not a problem. However, they have finally uploaded after a retry.

You can add video links, and while it doesn't add the transcript, you are able to use the AI summary tools on it. I did a bunch, and it worked well. Now revisiting the same links, all the AI summary information has been wiped. Also, the feature is not working for any item in my reference manager.

On a few occasions, when I’m in a folder and select all the files, and then use the chat with paper feature, it transfers over to the chat, but I noticed on some occasions that it pulled a lot more documents into the chat than what I had selected. I had to delete the chat and start again.

My workbooks.

Being able to rename your workbooks should be a fundamental feature to help you organize.

Also, there isn’t an easy way to transfer the results in a table cell elsewhere, like a document. There should be some sort of transfer or scratch pad.

My chats.

Again, no way to rename a chat for better organization.

YouTube videos work well with chats, and you can get a transcript and chat with them; again, a save to references feature for the transcript might be useful.

However, I notice a few times that prompts don’t seem to be as effective. Sometimes it says it doesn’t have access to the content, and you have to try again, and sometimes be explicit that you are querying a transcript or a video.

When chatting with multiple documents, when you click a citation to one of the documents, it doesn't take you to the correct document page. It will take you to the page number of the document that is loaded.

So if I have document one loaded and it’s 10 pages long, and the citation points to document two, page 5, it will go to page 5 of document one. If you switch to document two, then of course it will work. However, Afforial, Socrates, and NotebookLM will do this automatically.

Also, when adding references from a literature review, while it works okay, there is no way to check from your chat that this has been done in the past. Once added, it gives a green tick, but when you go back to the chat, there is no indicator that the reference has been added.

On an iPad, the interface isn't well optimized; you have to rotate to see different parts of the screen.

I hope that some of these observations will be considered for review by the paperguide team and integrated into the product. I give it three stars (willing to updaste in the future) for now sincne I think its an improving producte but also has some rough edges.