Adobe has a new AI chatbot that will let you talk to PDFs, ask questions, get summaries

Upgrading more of its products with AI, Adobe on Tuesday announced the beta launch of a new AI Assistant for Reader and Acrobat that uses generative artificial intelligence to help users get more out of their PDF documents. The new AI feature is currently in Beta version and can help users generate summaries, answer questions, and format information for various purposes, such as emails, reports, and presentations.

According to Adobe, its AI Assistant for Reader and Acrobat is powered by the same AI and machine learning models that enable Acrobat Liquid Mode, a technology that supports responsive reading experiences for PDFs on mobile. These LLM models can analyse the structure and content of PDFs further backing the AI assistant in providing users with more reliable and high-quality outputs.

Explaining more about the AI chatbot, Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Document Cloud, says, "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 through Reader and Acrobat applications and services."

As for the availability of the new features, according to Adobe, the AI Assistant is currently available for Acrobat Individual, Pro and Teams customers and Acrobat Pro trialists, and will be rolled out to Reader users soon. Users can access AI Assistant by opening Reader or Acrobat and using the conversational interface.

Once available, here are some of the features that users can access through the AI Assistant:

• AI Assistant: You can ask an AI assistant to suggest questions based on the PDF's content and answer them using natural language.
• Generative summary: You can also ask for a short overview of the content inside long documents in easy-to-read formats.
• Intelligent citations: The AI assistant can also generate citations using Adobe's custom attribution engine and proprietary AI, so users can verify the source of the answers.
• Easy navigation: It can also create clickable links to help users find what they need in long documents quickly and easily.
• Formatted output: With this feature, the AI assistant can consolidate and format information into different types of content, such as top takeaways, text for emails, presentations, reports, and more. It also allows users to copy and paste the content easily.

With these features, Adobe's idea is to offer users a chatbot that can help them reduce the time-consuming tasks related to working with massive text documents. It can help users to get summaries, insights, and answers from their documents, and to create content for emails, reports, and presentations. Notably, Adobe AI assistant can be used with any document format supported by the app, such as Word and PowerPoint.

Meanwhile, Adobe assures that the feature follows data security protocols and does not store or use customer document content for training AI Assistant without their consent. Adobe says that AI Assistant is developed in accordance with its AI Ethics processes and that it uses the best technologies for different customer use cases. Additionally, the company also confirms that it does not allow third-party AI models to train on Adobe customer data.

Adobe AI assistant pricing and availability

Users who have Reader or Acrobat can use the AI Assistant with a new subscription plan that will be available after the beta period. The beta version is free for users who have Acrobat Standard or Pro Individual and Teams plans on desktop and web in English. Reader users in English will also get the beta version soon. Other languages are coming later. Enterprise customers can join a private beta.