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Great, now even PDFs will have AI built into them

The new AI Assistant built into Adobe's Acrobat.
Adobe

Adobe is delving deeper into implementing AI in its most popular services, this time with a new Assistant AI for Acrobat.

The generative AI-powered conversational engine is available today in beta and will make available a host of tools to heighten how people process and understand documents in Adobe. The features will be available in Acrobat Standard, Pro Individual, and Teams subscription plans on desktop and web during the beta period at no additional cost. The AI features are even coming to Reader, the company’s free PDF viewer.

Some of the highlight features that will launch with the beta Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant tool include:

  • Questions-and-answer recommendations from AI assistant based on content within a document.
  • Highlighting important details within a document.
  • Creating citations and summaries where you can click and confirm a source within a document.
  • Clickable links that help you easily navigate through long documents and find the important information you need.
  • Reformatting information from documents for other mediums including emails, presentations, reports, etc.

“Generative AI offers the promise of more intelligent document experiences to transform information overload into actionable knowledge and professional-looking content,” Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Adobe Document Cloud said in a statement.

“Acrobat is the de facto standard for the world’s most important documents, and the capabilities introduced today are just the beginning of the new value Adobe intends to deliver through AI Assistant,” he added.

Adobe also notes that it has implemented data security protocols into its new Acrobat service and that customer content is not stored or used for training the AI Assistant.

AI Assistant creating an AI summary of a PDF.
Adobe

The company gave some examples of potential users, including project managers, sales teams, students, and social media and marketing teams. It has already released several AI services including its text-to-image generator Adobe Firefly and its AI-powered image editor app Adobe Express. Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant is an addition to the brand’s forward-looking road map.

Adobe said its plans include AI Assistant being able to work with many documents, document types, and sources, as well as upgrades in AI authoring, editing, and formatting. It will also be bringing features from Firefly and Adobe Express into AI Assistant, further increasing collaborating and document sharing, as well as making feedback more efficient.

The  new AI Assistant features will be available in beta today, and will be rolling out to Reader desktop customers over the next few weeks for free. Adobe says that desktops customers will have access to all the new AI Assistant features, which will eventually be available as an add-on subscription plan after the beta ends.

Fionna Agomuoh
Fionna Agomuoh is a technology journalist with over a decade of experience writing about various consumer electronics topics…
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