Adobe Brings Conversational AI To PDFs To Make Sense Of Your Docs

Image courtesy of Adobe

Adobe, the brains behind the ubiquitous PDF, is hoping to change the way we interact with documents with AI Assistant, which is coming first to Reader and Acrobat.

Now in beta, AI Assistant is designed to pull out the key points from lengthy documents, answer specific questions you have about the content, and help you format information for emails, reports, and presentations—all with the goal of making information more accessible and actionable for users. It’s probably what you wished Clippy the digital paperclip was good for.

The feature is powered by the same AI and machine learning models that fuel Acrobat Liquid Mode, which has been making PDFs more mobile-friendly. These systems are trained to have a deep understanding of the structure and content of PDFs, and are thus well-suited to provide insights that are both accurate and handy. 

Excited about the potential of generative AI to transform static PDFs into dynamic sources of knowledge, Abhigyan Modi, Adobe’s senior vice president for Document Cloud, teases that this is just scratching the surface for Reader and Acrobat.

Image courtesy of Adobe

“Generative AI offers the promise of more intelligent document experiences by transforming the information inside PDFs into actionable knowledge and professional-looking content,” shares Modi. “PDF is the de facto standard for the world’s most important documents and the capabilities introduced today are just the beginning of the value AI Assistant will deliver through Reader and Acrobat applications and services.”

For now, AI Assistant can recommend questions to ask based on a PDF’s content, provide concise summaries of long documents, generate citations for the information it gives you, and create easy-to-navigate links within documents. It can also format key takeaways or information into text suitable for various outputs, like emails or presentations.

Image courtesy of Adobe

Adobe emphasizes that AI Assistant respects user privacy, with strict data security protocols in place. No customer document content is stored or used for training its models without consent.

With that, the company’s vision for PDFs extends beyond just making documents easier to manage. Looking ahead, it plans to expand AI Assistant’s capabilities to simultaneously infer from multiple documents, and enable AI-powered authoring, editing, and creative document design.

AI Assistant’s beta version is now available at no additional cost to Acrobat Individual, Pro, and Teams customers, including those trying out Acrobat Pro, while Reader desktop members will be able to access these features in English in the next few weeks. Multilingual support is coming soon.

[via Adobe, images courtesy]