There are a lot of companies cramming AI features into unhelpful tools, but Adobe generally isn’t doing that. Its Adobe Firefly-powered versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects have been successful, and a lot of people find themselves using the AI features in software like Photoshop on a daily basis. Two Adobe programs that have lacked generative AI, however, include Acrobat and Reader. Now, this is changing.
Adobe has launched AI Assistant in beta, an AI-powered conversational engine integrated into Reader and Acrobat. This tool generates summaries, insights, and answers questions from lengthy documents, enhancing productivity and facilitating information sharing. Basically, you can think of it as an AI sidekick that can read through your PDF documents and help you understand them better. If you’ve ever found yourself dumping the contents of a PDF document into ChatGPT and asking it questions, this is sort of a better version of that.
According to Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president at Document Cloud, the aim is to enhance document experiences by transforming PDF content into actionable, professional-looking material. The initial features are accessible to Acrobat Individual, Pro, and Teams customers, with Reader integration forthcoming. You can interact with AI Assistant through a conversational interface and receive generative summaries, citations, easy navigation, and formatted outputs.
Adobe emphasizes data security and privacy, assuring customers that no document content is stored or used for training AI Assistant without consent. Beyond PDFs, AI Assistant can work with various document formats as well, although you’ll probably use it for PDFs 95% of the time. The tool is apparently developed in accordance with Adobe’s AI Ethics processes.
Adobe envisions further enhancements to AI Assistant as well, including the ability to provide insights across multiple documents, AI-powered authoring and editing, creative document creation, and improved collaboration through AI-supported reviews. So while the initial beta version is pretty useful, it should also just be a barebones version of what’s to come in the next few months and years, provided Adobe continues to work on the functionality.
AI Assistant is available in a beta stage for Adobe Standard/Pro/Teams users, and when it goes out of beta, Adobe wants to charge an extra subscription for it—so be mindful of that if you’re planning to get used to it.
Source: Adobe
