Adobe has revealed a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Assistant in Reader and Acrobat, marking the company’s first steps in transforming digital document experiences with generative AI technologies.
The AI Assistant, currently in beta, automatically generates summaries and insights from extensive documents, provides answers to queries, and formats information for sharing in emails, reports, and presentations. Upon its launch, Acrobat and Reader users will have access to the full array of capabilities offered by the AI Assistant as part of a new subscription plan.
The Assistant promises to bring generative AI technology to the approximately three trillion PDFs worldwide. It relies on the same AI and Machine Learning (ML) models as Acrobat's award-winning Liquid Mode, which underpins responsive reading experiences for PDFs on mobile. These proprietary models furnish a deep understanding of the structure and content of PDFs, ensuring the outputs of the AI Assistant are of the highest quality.
Senior Vice President for Document Cloud, Abhigyan Modi, commented, "Generative AI offers the promise of more intelligent document experiences by transforming the information inside PDFs into actionable knowledge and professional-looking content. 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."
The AI Assistant will revolutionise the way individuals and organisations interact with their most important documents. Individual, Pro and teams clients of Acrobat, as well as Acrobat Pro trialists, can presently utilise the Assistant to enhance their productivity with new features coming to Reader in the near future.
These include the AI assistant itself, which recommends questions based on a PDF's content and provides answers about the document via a conversational interface. There's also the generative summary feature, an intelligent citation generator, easy navigation and formatted output for ease of use, among many others.
Despite the innovations, Adobe remains committed to respecting customer data. All AI Assistant functions in Acrobat and Reader are governed by data security protocols and customers' document content is not stored or used for training the Assistant without their express consent.
Aside from handling PDF content, customers can also apply AI Assistant to deal with all types of document formats such as Word and PowerPoint files, and meeting transcripts.
Looking ahead, Adobe has a robust roadmap for the future of AI Assistant. This includes insights across multiple documents and document types, AI-powered authoring, editing, formatting, intelligent creation, and AI-supported collaboration reviews, among others.
The full range of AI Assistant's features will be accessible to Acrobat and Reader users through a new add-on subscription plan once the beta phase is over. In the meantime, the new features are available in beta for Acrobat Pro and Acrobat Standard customers.