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Adobe has announced major advancements in artificial intelligence within Adobe Acrobat, aimed at enhancing creativity and productivity in digital documents. As of 18 June 2024, Acrobat users can create and edit images within the nearly 3 trillion PDFs in circulation using text prompts powered by Adobe Firefly. Notably, Acrobat is the first PDF solution to include in-app generative image capabilities.
The new features leverage Adobe Firefly's AI capabilities and are incorporated into the Acrobat AI Assistant—an engine deeply integrated into Reader and Acrobat workflows. This engine allows users to ask questions, gather insights, and create content from information across multiple PDF documents, as well as other document types including Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files. Enhanced meeting transcript capabilities have also been introduced, providing generative summaries for quick understanding of main topics, key points, and action items from virtual meetings.
"From Edit and Share to Protect and Export, Adobe has consistently innovated PDF, transforming it from a static page into a collaborative workspace," said Abhigyan Modi, Senior Vice President of Adobe Document Cloud. "With generative AI, we can advance the category again with image creation and insights across a new range of document types, empowering every customer with a deeper understanding and the ability to transform information into compelling content with the ease and speed of a simple prompt."
The integration of Adobe Firefly into Acrobat enables users to enhance or create new images within PDFs. This includes features such as 'Edit Image' with tools like Generative Fill, Remove Background, Erase, and Crop. These tools allow for the addition, removal, and revitalisation of content in document images seamlessly. Additionally, the 'Generate Image' feature allows users to add new, high-quality images to their PDFs. Sales teams, entrepreneurs, and small business owners can particularly benefit from these tools to enrich their documents with professional visuals.
New capabilities within Acrobat AI Assistant include support for synthesising information across multiple documents. This feature enables users to identify key themes, trends, and relationships from a selected group of documents and to format the synthesised information into impactful content for specific purposes. Enhanced meeting transcript capabilities further bolster productivity by automatically generating summaries to help users stay up-to-speed with meeting discussions and actions.
Adobe has emphasised their commitment to ethical AI use and transparency. The company has stated that their generative AI models are not trained on customer data and adhere to Adobe’s AI Ethics principles, which include standards for accountability, responsibility, and transparency. Content Credentials are automatically attached to digital content created or edited using Firefly-powered features in Acrobat to signify the use of AI, thereby building trust among users.
To strengthen the security and reliability of these AI features, Adobe has implemented stringent data security protocols. These include methodologies for testing and evaluation within engineering processes and mechanisms to ensure enhanced reliability. Third-party large language models (LLMs) used by Adobe are subjected to confidentiality and security protocols matching Adobe’s standards, prohibiting the manual review or use of customer data for training purposes.
Adobe's Acrobat AI Assistant aims to keep users in control of their information by delivering insights based on the documents provided by users rather than from broader enterprise information, thus safeguarding against unintended data analysis. AI Assistant also includes attributions to enable users to verify sources with ease.
Adobe is offering free, full access to all Acrobat AI Assistant features from 18 June to 28 June 2024. Following this period, both free Reader users and paid Acrobat customers will have the opportunity to purchase an AI Assistant add-on subscription, starting at USD $4.99 per month until 4 September 2024. Individual Acrobat Standard and Pro customers will receive 250 generative credits monthly at no additional cost for a limited time to use the new image-editing features.
