What Is Rivul AI
Rivul AI (rivul.ai) is a free multimodal AI research workspace. Papers, PDFs and scans, recordings, and your own library go in; answers, cited briefs, and agent reports come out.
Research material rarely arrives as one clean PDF. It is a search result, a scanned chapter, a recorded interview, a lecture, and a folder of papers you already read. Rivul AI turns each of those sources into text it can search, then lets AI work across them while keeping the path back to the page or timestamp.
Search Papers and Build a Library
Search metadata for more than 300 million scholarly works (titles, authors, abstracts, citations and open-access links) without an AI key, save useful results, or add your own PDFs (5 stored at a time, up to 10 MB each) by upload, DOI, arXiv ID, a .bib file, Google Drive, or Zotero. Rivul AI is free for everyone; sign in with Google.
Rivul AI combines records from established scholarly infrastructure. Read the OpenAlex works documentation for discovery metadata and the Crossref REST API documentation for DOI metadata. These records help identify sources; the original publication remains the authority for its findings.
Turn Documents and Recordings Into Text
Document OCR reads scanned PDFs and images and returns plain text or Markdown. Transcribe turns lectures, interviews, and other recordings into text with timestamps. Listen reads a paper or draft aloud. These run on Rivul AI's own servers and need no AI key. See Document OCR and Transcribe, and verify OCR text before you rely on it.
Ask Your Library and Research a Question
Ask Rivul is retrieval-augmented generation over your own library: it finds the relevant passages in the papers you pick and cites each one by page. The Research notebook writes a cited brief with a findings table. AI features run on your own Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, or Meta API key, billed by that provider; Rivul AI adds no AI fee.
Run Research Agents With Skills
A research agent has a goal, sources, and an output format. Give it a question and it searches papers and your library, reads the most relevant ones, and writes a report that cites each claim. Runs keeps every step and source, and Skills are reusable SKILL.md instructions that guide an agent's method. Read Agents and Runs and Skills.
Use Rivul MCP in Your AI Tools
Rivul MCP is a remote MCP server with read-only tools for scholarly search and paper records, so Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other MCP clients can search the same index. A REST API serves your own scripts. See Rivul MCP.
Write and Export When You Are Ready
When the research becomes a paper, the editor keeps citations linked to their source records, checks a claim against its cited passage, and exports Word, LaTeX, Markdown, or BibTeX. Review Rivul AI's data sources and the AI-use disclosure for data handling and limitations.
Rivul AI is free. Sign in with Google to search metadata for 300M+ works, keep 5 PDFs (up to 10 MB each) beside your draft, and export to Word, LaTeX, BibTeX or Markdown. AI features use your own Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral or Meta API key.