Adobe Acrobat now has its own insanely powerful AI

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As AI gets woven in across the company’s products, Adobe Acrobat just grew its own artificial intelligence with tools to create images, generate insights, format content and even more useful tasks, all within existing PDFs.  The company is making the tools available for free use by everyone from June 18 to June 28, after which a few will apply.

Key Highlights of the release include 

• Generative AI images come to PDF for the first time:With the new generate and edit image capabilities in Acrobat powered by the new Adobe Firefly Image 3 Foundation Model, customers can enhance images already in their documents and create new images from a simple text prompt that are designed to be “safe for work” – all without leaving Acrobat.
• New Acrobat AI Assistant value: Launched earlier this year – Acrobat AI Assistant is already making a major leap forward – enabling users to seamlessly query multiple documents – PDF and many other formats (Word, PPT, txt, and more).  Ask AI Assistant to find common themes, do calculations and create content from multi-document, multi-format body of information – in seconds.
• Adobe has improved one of the most-loved features – meeting transcripts –making it super simple and fast to   automatically generate summaries of conversations to get a quick understanding of main topics and key points – and surface action items quickly.

What Adobe said

“From Edit and Share to Protect and Export, Adobe has consistently innovated PDF, transforming it from a static page into a collaborative workspace,” said Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president, Adobe Document Cloud. “With generative AI we can advance the category again with image creation and insights across a new range of document types, empowering every customer with a deeper understanding and ability to transform information into compelling content – with the ease and speed of a simple prompt.”

Speak, tell, and do

New features in Acrobat AI Assistant, a conversational engine deeply integrated into Reader and Acrobat workflows, will allow customers to ask questions, get insights and create content from information across groups of PDFs – and other document types – including Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, text files and more.

The new Acrobat features enable customers to easily enhance existing images and generate stunning new images in their PDFs with generative AI – all without leaving the app. You can edit images, including Generative Fill, Remove Background, Erase and Crop. You can also generate entire images, adjusting size, style and more, which should make for better business communications in general. The AI will also create meeting summaries, bringing together main topics, key points and action items.

Powerful research tools

Adobe says its Acrobat AI Assistant will also be able to look through and gather insights from across multiple documents. In a press release, the company describes the following example of this feature in use: “For example, a marketer is researching ways to reach Gen Z customers from the information across a group of PDF, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint documents. The marketer can drag and drop those documents into Acrobat AI Assistant, which quickly generates suggested questions like “Give an overview of the key themes presented in these documents.” The marketer can also ask their own questions, “What are the social media habits of Gen Z?” AI Assistant generates answers based on the information in the group of documents and includes intelligent citations, allowing the marketer to easily verify the source of the answer or quickly navigate to a specific location for deeper exploration.”

Free for a little while

Adobe is offering free, full access to all Acrobat AI Assistant features June 18 – June 28, after which time free Reader or paid Acrobat customers have the opportunity to purchase an AI Assistant add-on subscription.

Early access pricing for the AI Assistant add-on subscription starts at US$4.99 per month and is available until September 4. Acrobat AI Assistant subscription plans are available on desktop, web and mobile in English—other languages to follow. Starting June 18, 2024, all individual Acrobat Standard and Pro customers will receive 250 generative credits per month at no additional cost for a limited time to use with Edit Image and Generate Image features. Edit Image and Generate Image will initially be available in English on desktop.

The company stressed that it does not train the company’s generative AI models on Adobe customer data and stressed it is following its own AI Ethics principles of accountability, responsibility and transparency.

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