Model Config

Paperwise stores model connections and task routing per user. After signing in, open Settings > Model Config to configure the AI-backed parts of the product.

Supported connection types

Paperwise currently supports:

• OpenAI
• Gemini
• Custom (OpenAI-compatible)

Each connection can include:

• provider
• API key
• base URL when required
• default model

How task routing works

Paperwise lets you assign a connection and optional model override to each task:

• Metadata Extraction
• Grounded Q&A
• OCR

This means you can use a lighter or cheaper model for extraction and a stronger reasoning model for grounded Q&A.

Recommended first configuration

If you just want a working setup, start simple:

1. Add one provider connection.
2. Use that connection for Metadata Extraction.
3. Use that same connection for Grounded Q&A.
4. For OCR, choose either:
   • LLM if you want OCR handled through a multimodal model
   • Local Tesseract if you want OCR to stay local

OCR modes

LLM OCR

When OCR is set to LLM, Paperwise sends rendered page images to the selected model. This is usually better for scans, forms, image-heavy PDFs, and harder layouts.

Local Tesseract

When OCR is set to Local Tesseract, OCR runs locally using tesseract and pdftoppm. This is a good default for privacy-sensitive setups and clean printed scans.

Auto switch

Paperwise also supports an auto-switch mode so OCR is only used when direct text extraction looks weak.

Suggested starting models

These are practical starting points, not hard requirements:

Task	OpenAI example	Gemini example
OCR	gpt-5-mini	gemini-2.5-flash
Metadata extraction	gpt-5-mini	gemini-2.5-flash
Grounded Q&A	gpt-5.1	gemini-2.5-pro

If your documents are mostly clean text PDFs, start with the faster models and only move up when quality is not good enough.

See Which models should I use? for more detailed starting recommendations and tradeoffs.

Common setup issues

• Upload blocked: configure Metadata Extraction first.
• Ask My Docs not available: configure Grounded Q&A first.
• OCR failures on scans: switch OCR to a stronger multimodal model or try Local Tesseract for cleaner documents.
• Custom provider not working: verify the base URL and API key in Model Config.

Next: Q&A