Adobe Unveils Acrobat AI Assistant for PDFs; Can Generate Summaries, Answer Questions

Adobe has finally launched generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features for its Acrobat and Reader platforms. Dubbed Acrobat AI Assistant, the company first unveiled the AI features in February 2024 in beta. After spending almost two months in testing, it is now available to users globally. The AI assistant is available on both desktop and web clients. Additionally, Adobe is also highlighted that the company is working on a text-to-video AI model.

Making the announcement, Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Adobe Document Cloud, said, “Whether it’s doing taxes, collaborating on contracts or creating and sharing research papers, Acrobat is the trusted platform for PDFs. Acrobat AI Assistant empowers billions of people to shift from reading documents to having a conversation – enabling them to get insights and format and share content from all kinds of digital documents – quickly and easily.”

According to Adobe, the Acrobat AI Assistant is a generative AI-powered conversational engine integrated with the Reader and Acrobat workflows. It can assist users in multiple ways. The chatbot can recommend questions based on a PDF’s content as well as answer user queries. It can follow conversational speech, like major AI chatbots. The AI assistant can also generate summaries from long documents in easy-to-read formats.

Further, the Acrobat AI Assistant can also generate citations using a custom attribution engine. This can help users verify the source of the answers given by the AI. The company claims the AI also offers clickable links to locate information in long documents. The summaries can be easily shared using a copy button provided in the interface. On data privacy, Adobe says no customer document content is stored or used to train AI assistants without their consent.

Apart from the familiar web and desktop interfaces, the company has also made Acrobat AI assistant available in beta on Acrobat Reader mobile. The feature also supports voice commands. Additionally, users can also find the AI chatbot in Acrobat’s existing Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge extensions.

The Acrobat AI Assistant will be available to users with free Reader or paid Acrobat for individual plans if they purchase a new AI Assistant add-on subscription that starts at $4.99 (roughly Rs. 420) a month. Adobe says this is an early access pricing and it can increase after June 5.