She may not have used Adobe products on the celebrated TV show The Office, but Adobe was happy to have actress Mindy Kaling as the celebrity headliner for its “Summit Sneaks” presentation at the company’s annual Adobe Summit. The Sneaks portion of the event, which is held in Las Vegas for the advertising community, highlights projects in various stages of development.
Each of the seven projects demonstrated make use of Adobe’s rich machine learning, augmented reality (AR), and other elements. While the technologies might first make their way to advertiser dashboards, some tech will show up as features in photo- and video-editing software, apps, and other platforms that may reach the rest of us.
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is at the core of most of these projects, and to some it can be the most exciting — and the scariest. When Adobe executive Steve Hammond asked Kaling how she felt about A.I., the comedian’s immediate response was predictably humorous: “A robot that turns on me and kills me and my friends.” Let’s hope those “concerns” were eased over the course of the seven demos.
To solve the issue of sorting through images, a new program dubbed “Phonic Filters” allows users to search for images and photos by voice or text commands. The program’s A.I. can quickly sort through folders and subfolders of images, such as pictures of jewelry, for example. The A.I. can then drill down into photos of rings, diamond rings, and diamond rings on someone’s hand. Through voice commands, the photos can also be edited, with the subject being cut out of one photo, and placed over a background image, such as the ring-bearer’s hand atop a floral bouquet.
“Expert Assist” is an A.I. bot embedded in Slack that allows groups to test and fine-tune marketing elements such as email open rates. By typing a proposed email title in Slack with the command “/Sensei openrate,” followed by the sample text, Adobe’s A.I. Sensei draws from data within the client’s dashboards to advise on the projected open rate. Similar commands are used to crop photos for advertising and apply copy in the best location ,so it won’t interfere with the image. This service will be welcomed by advertisers and could eventually make its way to all users.
“Augmented Offers” lets advertisers implement and track campaigns using AR. The mobile-centric program can reach consumers at highly relevant times, such as when a mobile customer is browsing a certain retail. T users taking part in this AR campaign might be able to view more information on a book, discover new music, or drool over an enticing image of a cookie. Augmented Offers serves metrics back to advertisers.
Other Sneaks projects include Data Unbound, Journey Genius, Intelligent Agent, and a car diagnostic app called Car Smarts. Attendees used Twitter hashtags to vote on each project during the Sneaks session.
