Why trust Greenbot
Adobe is offering you the privilege of never having to skim a long document again for $4.99 a month. The company transformed its ubiquitous PDF software into an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversation partner on April 15 with the Acrobat AI Assistant.
The assistant is now generally available across desktop, web, and mobile platforms, marking a significant step in Adobe’s ambitious push into generative AI.
Deep AI integration transforms workflows
Acrobat AI Assistant helps users work with documents more easily. It can quickly summarize long documents, answer questions about their content, and find and navigate to specific information. This helps professionals quickly understand key points from reports, notes, and other texts without reading everything in detail. The tool processes up to 10 files simultaneously, handling documents as long as 600 pages.
“Acrobat AI Assistant empowers billions of people to shift from reading documents to having a conversation,” said Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Adobe Document Cloud.
Adobe built the assistant using GPT -4 technology, which is the same AI powering ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. However, Adobe’s implementation stands out through its custom attribution engine, which generates clear citations to verify information sources within documents. This particularly helps mitigate hallucinations or false information spewed by generative AI.
“It’s a powerful research assistant that can sift through information and let you confirm it’s actually getting things right,” says Chris Hoffman, technology journalist at Computerworld, who tested the tool before its release.
Adobe’s proprietary image generation model, Firefly, also comes built-in with the tool. Users can generate images based on textual prompts within documents. This addition makes the tool invaluable for professionals who rely on both textual and visual communication.
Enterprise-grade security and user privacy
Adobe remains committed to respecting user privacy by releasing a blog post detailing how it uses customer data. Unlike ChatGPT, the tool processes only the document provided by the user. Additionally, it automatically deletes conversation history from cloud services after 12 hours. The tool also protects business data through strict data governance policies. The company prohibits training on customer data and encrypts all sensitive content.
The tool is available for mobile and desktop or as a Chrome and Edge browser extension, charging $4.99 monthly. Enterprise customers receive additional features like administrative controls and just-in-time provisioning. Adobe plans to expand the AI Assistant’s capabilities to include automated authoring and collaborative features.
With Acrobat AI Assistant, Adobe combines cutting-edge AI with practical utility, making it easier for users to manage, create, and extract insights from their documents. Research from Pfeiffer Consulting found that document-related tasks, including summarizing and data extraction, were completed four times faster with the assistant. This innovation showcases Adobe’s commitment to leading the way in AI-powered productivity solutions.
