If CES showed us anything this year, it’s that virtual assistants are the future of human-device interaction. Apple, Google, Amazon, and others have already implemented virtual assistants into devices and it appears Adobe will soon be doing the same.
Adobe’s research team has shared a new video showing off a working version of Lightroom Mobile that has an integrated voice assistant, similar to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, that’s used to edit photos via voice commands.
Rather than using your fingertips to adjust the sliders and icons within Lightroom Mobile, the conceptual assistant will wait for your instructions and alter the image(s) accordingly.
During the 30-second teaser, we only see the assistant crop, rotate, and share an image, but the possibilities are seemingly endless. Imagine being able to tell Lightroom to “bump up the exposure by a stop” or “set the color temperature to daylight.” This assistant could theoretically do that.
Adobe notes the voice assistant is already capable of using either on-device computing or cloud-based services for voice recognition and parsing. This ensures the assistant would work regardless of whether or not you’re connected to the internet.
Beyond the convenience factor, this conceptual assistant could also prove beneficial to photographers who have limited motor function due to a physical handicap. Photographers like James Dunn could soon have the final piece of the photographic workflow in place to capture, edit, and share images.
Despite the already impressive capabilities, there’s still a great deal of work to be done. Adobe says it’s “a first step toward a robust multimodal voice-based interface which allows our creative customers to search and edit images in an easy and engaging way using Adobe mobile applications.”
