Adobe Acrobat's AI chatbot could actually be super useful
From ChatGPT to Bard, AI chatbots are cropping up everywhere, and it turns out that even the design software giant Adobe had one up its sleeve. It's adding generative AI to Acrobat, which remains the best PDF editor out there.
While "chatting" with a PDF might sound strange, the new tool could be very useful. It appears to make large documents easier to navigate, suggesting topics and helping us to find information more quickly.
Adobe says the AI Assistant in Acrobat is a conversational engine that can summarise documents, answer users' questions and make recommendations based on the content. It can answer questions about a document's content, providing citations from the text and clickable links to back up its answers, and it can also recommend questions users may want to explore
The chatbot looks like it could help students sift documents for relevant information for research projects or help business user to quickly form a summary for use in meetings, and presentations. Adobe says the chatbot complies with its data security protocols and doesn't store data from customer documents or use it to train itself. As well as PDF, the assistant will work on other formats supported by Acrobat, such as Word and PowerPoint.
AI Assistant in Acrobat is available in beta for paying Acrobat users at no extra charge. It appears there may be plans to charge an additional fee for access to at least some of its features once the beta is over.
In other Adobe news, the company recently confirmed that Adobe XD won't be getting a reboot. See our Adobe software list for the lowdown on the company's main products, or see the best Creative Cloud prices in your region below.
