What Is Rivul AI
Rivul AI is a free multimodal AI research workspace. Bring in PDFs, scans, recordings, text or papers, then ask, research and run agents across them.
On this page
Who it is for
Anyone who works from sources:
Students turn a recorded lecture into a timestamped transcript and ask questions across the week's readings.
Engineers search papers and read their metadata from Claude Code, Codex or Cursor through Rivul MCP, or call the same search over the REST API.
Academics search 300M+ academic papers, keep the ones they use in a Library, and draft with numbered references.
Researchers run agents that search, read and write a cited report, and keep every run and source for review.
Anyone else can get plain answers from a long PDF such as a contract or a manual, listen to an article, or transcribe a voice note or a meeting.
From any source
PDFs and papers: upload a PDF up to 10 MB to the Library, add one by DOI or arXiv ID, import a .bib file, or pull files from Google Drive and Zotero. Scanned PDFs are read with OCR when you add them.
Search papers: search 300M+ academic papers in the Rivul Index, with no AI key.
Scans and images: Document OCR returns the text of PDFs, scans and images, as plain text or Markdown.
Recordings: Transcribe turns audio and video, or a recording made in the browser, into timestamped text.
Text: Listen reads a library paper, a draft or pasted text aloud.
Research across it
Ask Rivul answers questions across your own PDFs and cites each passage it used, with its page.
Research runs a question across the Rivul Index and your Library and writes a cited brief with a findings table.
Agents run a saved research brief on a question: they search, read and write a cited report, and Runs keeps every step. Skills are reusable instructions that guide how an agent works.
Rivul MCP gives your own AI client, such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, read-only paper search through one connection.
Write, cite and export
Papers is the editor for a draft, with references from your Library, claim checks against your sources, version history, and export to Word, LaTeX, Markdown, plain text and BibTeX. Citation tools format a single reference from a DOI or a saved paper.
Free, with your own AI key
Once you are signed in, every Rivul AI capability is free: search, sources, Ask Rivul, Research, agents, Rivul MCP, citations, and export. You can store up to 5 PDFs at a time; Library shows how many are stored.
AI features run on your own API key from Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, or Meta, and your provider bills you directly. Search, the Library, Document OCR, Transcribe, Listen and Rivul MCP need no AI key.
Where your data goes
Your text goes to the AI provider you connected only when you use an AI feature, and only the passages that feature needs. Document OCR, Transcribe, library search and the Rivul voice run on Rivul AI's own servers. Rivul AI does not train models on your files.
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