Adobe Acrobat gets an AI assistant.

At this point chat with PDF tools are the “Hello World” of GenAI apps. So, I asked Adobe’s Scott Belsky in December: why isn’t Adobe on that train? And he replied: already in beta.

Well, now Adobe announced it officially: Meet AI assistant in Acrobat (still in beta).

What’s going on here?

Adobe announced its AI assistant in Acrobat, a way to chat with your documents.

What does that mean?

Similar to the other apps where you can use AI to chat with your documents, you can:

• Get quick section-wise summaries of your documents. Makes going through them easier.

• Ask questions based on your documents and the assistant replies. Answers are based on your document and cite where it got that info from.

• Create content from that document's context: emails, key takeaways, meeting notes etc. AI assistant helps you do that too.

Keep in mind that Beta = Limitations. Big files, password protection, and scanned PDFs aren't supported yet. It works in English and on desktop only. Currently AI assistant is free to try for Acrobat subscribers but this will be an add-on subscription once it's generally available.

But instead of sharing your documents with third-party apps, AI assistant works within Adobe’s Acrobat app (coming soon the Reader app). And Adobe is stressing they don't store your data for training and follow responsible practices. Although, they don’t mention whose LLMs they are using. OpenAI? Google? Their own?

Why should I care?

I know the pain of uploading PDFs to AI apps, so getting AI features natively into the default apps is nice. It’s still a beta version. I can understand. If it says anything wrong, (which it likely will) Adobe comes in the line of fire.

Another POV is that big companies hold their PDFs close to heart. The trust is hard to come by. So when big players like Adobe, which they are likely already using come in with AI features, these companies also get on board.

Just like Firefly’s V1 (Adobe’s image generation tool), this doesn’t look the best of what’s out there but you can expect more features and upgrades soon.