Hey Product Hunt! š
I'm Neeraj, the maker of Carrel.
This started with a problem I kept hitting myself: whenever I had to actually learn something from a PDF - a textbook chapter, a research paper, dense course notes - I'd end up with a mess of open tabs. The PDF in one window, ChatGPT in another, a whiteboard app for mapping ideas, sticky notes somewhere else, a to-do list I'd forget about. Five tools, none of them talking to each other.
So I built Carrel: upload a PDF, and you get a full study workspace built around it.
š Read & annotate ā highlight anything and ask about it right there
šØ Board ā an Excalidraw-style canvas to think visually
š Notes ā sticky + structured notes, tied to your document
ā Todos ā turn what you're learning into a plan
š¬ AI Chat ā and this is the part I'm most proud of:
The AI doesn't just read your PDF. It has context of your *entire* workspace - your notes, your whiteboard, your annotations, your to-dos, and the document. So you can ask things like "what's left on my to-dos for this chapter?" or "summarize my notes against what the doc actually says." It knows what you're working on, not just what the file says.
Every AI answer is grounded in your actual documents, with sources - so no hallucinated nonsense.
I built this solo, and it's still early - I'd genuinely love your feedback on what would make this something you'd reach for before an exam or a deep-work session. What's missing? What would you want it to do?
Thanks for checking it out š