Multimodal AI Research Workspace
About Rivul AI
Rivul AI (rivul.ai) is a free Multimodal AI Research Workspace: search metadata for 300M+ academic papers, turn PDFs, scans and recordings into text, ask your own library with RAG, run research agents with skills, listen to any text, and use it all from Claude, Codex or Cursor through Rivul MCP. Bring your own key (BYOK).
Built and maintained by Arjun Prabhulal.
- Papers
- PDFs & scans
- Recordings
- Your library
- Your AI tools
Everything in the Workspace
Every feature, grouped the way the app sidebar groups them. See Features for screenshots and limits.
Write
- PapersAn editor where a draft keeps its sources: grounded autocomplete, tracked suggestions, and numbered citations.
- ResearchAsk a question and get a cited brief and a findings table from the Rivul Index and your Library.
- Ask RivulRAG over your own documents: answers that cite each passage they use, with its page.
Agents
- Rivul MCPA remote MCP server and REST API: search from Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or your own apps.
- AgentsAI agents that search papers and your library, read the most relevant ones, and write a cited report.
- RunsEvery agent run with its steps, the sources it read, and its report, downloadable as Markdown.
- SkillsReusable SKILL.md instructions for agents: 709 skills (65 from Rivul, 644 from the skills.sh community) and your own.
Sources
- LibraryA private PDF library with a reader, highlights and notes, full-text search, and Ask this paper.
- Search papersSearch metadata for 300M+ academic papers by title, author, topic, or DOI.
- ConnectorsThe Google Drive and Google Docs picker, Zotero import and push, AI clients, and your AI provider.
Convert
- Document OCRText or Markdown from PDFs, scans and images, such as a scanned contract, report, or chapter.
- TranscribeMeetings, interviews, lectures and voice notes to timestamped text, exported as .txt, .srt, .vtt or .docx.
- ListenAny paper, draft, article or long document read aloud, with the sentence being read highlighted.
Tools
- Citation toolsFormat a DOI or a saved paper in IEEE, ACM, APA, MLA or Chicago, build BibTeX, convert BibTeX or RIS, and fill an evidence table.
Account
- AccountBring your own key for 6 AI providers, account-data export, an activity log, account deletion, and the same workspace in a phone browser.
Anyone who works from sources
Who It's For
Students
Turn a recorded lecture into timestamped notes with Transcribe, then ask your readings questions with Ask Rivul.
Engineers
Search metadata for 300M+ papers from Claude Code, Codex or Cursor through Rivul MCP, or call the REST API from your own scripts.
Academics
Run a research agent on a question and get a report that cites each claim, then keep the draft's citations in sync in Papers.
Researchers
Read a scanned report with Document OCR and put its findings beside the papers in your Library in a cited Research brief.
Free, With Your Own Key
Every account gets every feature at no cost, with no card and no trial. Sign in with Google. AI features run on your own key for Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, or Meta, stored encrypted and billed by your provider; Rivul AI pays for no model calls and never trains models on your work. Search, reading, OCR, transcription, Listen, citing, and export work without a key. Each account can keep 5 PDFs stored at a time, and you can export or delete everything whenever you want.
Built on Open Data and Open Standards
Open scholarly data
The Rivul Index is built using the open OpenAlex dataset (CC0). It holds metadata records for 300M+ works (titles, authors, abstracts, citation counts and open-access links), not full text. Rivul AI also draws on Crossref, DataCite, arXiv, and Semantic Scholar, each credited on the sources page.
Open formats
Transcripts leave as .txt, .srt, .vtt or .docx, OCR as text or Markdown, agent reports as Markdown, and papers as Word, LaTeX, Markdown or BibTeX.
Open protocols
Rivul MCP follows the Model Context Protocol, skills use the SKILL.md format, and a REST API with an OpenAPI schema serves your own scripts.
Rivul AI helps you inspect the chain from source to answer, but it cannot certify that an answer is complete or correct. Read the original source. The service's name is Rivul AI, and its official website is rivul.ai.