Hi everyone,
I've been quietly reading a lot of the discussions here about research tools, and I finally decided to join because I’ve hit a bit of a wall with my own project. I was really hopeful about Iris.ai for helping me sort through academic papers and reports for my small business, which is in the specialty food import sector. A lot of the sourcing guidelines, agricultural studies, and regulatory documents I need to review are not originally in English—they’re in Spanish, Portuguese, and sometimes Italian. While Iris.ai is powerful, I’ve found it really struggles to properly index and find connections when a significant portion of my source material is in other languages. It seems to work best in a fully English-language workflow, which isn't my reality.
So, I’m feeling a bit stuck and was hoping to ask for some unbiased advice. I’m looking for alternatives that might handle a multilingual library of documents more gracefully. My core need is to upload my own collection of PDFs and have the tool help me discover themes, connections, and extract key information across all of them, regardless of the language. Accuracy is super important, as these documents often contain crucial compliance details.
I work mostly alone, so I don’t need huge enterprise features, but I do value a clear and straightforward interface. I’m comfortable with a learning curve if the tool is powerful enough. Has anyone else dealt with a similar mix of languages in their research? I’d be so grateful for any personal experiences or recommendations for tools that might be better suited for this kind of multilingual analysis. Even knowing what to search for or what features to prioritize would be a huge help right now.
Ah, the old monolingual AI shuffle. Not the first time I've seen this. Your best bet is to look at tools built on multilingual transformer models, like BERT variants trained on 100+ languages.
I'd poke around at Litmaps or Scite. They might handle the cross-lingual context a bit better. But honestly, you're in a niche. Most of these platforms are optimized for English academia, not Spanish agricultural regs.
You could always roll your own pipeline with some scripts and a multilingual model, but that's a whole other can of worms. Expensive worms.
Deploy with love