Good news for people with too many documents and not enough time to read them: Adobe’s new AI Assistant can give you the “too long — didn’t read” (tl;dr) at the click of a button.
AI Assistant is a chatbot-like helper that analyzes documents — PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, etc. — and prompts users with recommended questions (Adobe originated the PDF format in the early 1990s). It has a custom attribution engine that provides citations for all its answers. This helps ease concerns about AI hallucinations. If you don’t feel like asking questions, it can condense key points and format them for emails, presentations, blogs and reports.
Dig deeper: Adobe continues to roll out genAI capabilities across its platform
It was released to all Adobe users this week after being announced and launched in beta in February, with subscription plans starting at $4.99 a month. Don’t get too comfortable with that price, though. The current price is an “early access” rate only available until June 5th.
The company also released a free, mobile version of AI Assistant in beta. This version can respond to voice commands. Adobe said the service will soon be available via extensions on Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.
Why we care. There’s no denying the convenience of this. If I could apply it to my email inbox it would be priceless. That said, the price point will be an important factor. The $5 a month dissuaded me from using it but the efficiencies provided at the enterprise level could make it a valuable add-on.
One other issue: There’s an old saying that the devil is in the details. An AI summary will likely miss a lot of useful devils.
