Adobe’s PDF-Reading AI Assistant Is Here, But It’ll Cost You

Adobe has a new tool to help you avoid drowning in a sea of documents–by reading them for you.

Acrobat AI Assistant, Adobe’s generative AI-powered tool for analyzing and engaging with documents, is billed as a a tool that enables users to instantly summarize long documents and surface information by interacting with a chatbot. According to Adobe Document Cloud senior vice president Abhigyan Modi, the AI assistant will help “billions” of people to more easily accomplish tasks by shifting the method of how people interact with documents from simply reading a file to having a conversation with one. The tool costs $5 per month.

Adobe announced the AI assistant in February, when it released a beta version of the product for free. The assistant takes the form of a red and blue button on the upper right-hand corner of the Acrobat toolbar that opens a side tab featuring a summary of the document, a text box for asking questions about the document, and a few suggested questions. 

The AI assistant is also capable of citing and linking back to its sources, so when it delivers an answer, users can click on it and jump right to the section of the document where that answer was pulled from. As for how teams can use the tool, Adobe says knowledge workers can use it to summarize long meeting transcripts and define action items, analysts can use it to quickly surface research findings, and sales teams can use it to locate key info within RFPs. 

Here’s how the AI assistant summarized Adobe’s press release announcing the product’s availability in one sentence: “Adobe has launched Acrobat AI Assistant, a generative AI-powered conversational engine integrated into Adobe Reader and Acrobat workflows, offering features such as question recommendations, generative summaries, intelligent citations, easy navigation, and content consolidation, empowering users to extract value and be more productive with their PDF documents.”

Adobe also announced that a free beta version of the AI assistant is now available on the Acrobat Reader mobile app, as well as through its existing Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge expansions. The company says both free and paid Acrobat users can unlock the AI assistant for “an early-access price of $4.99, expiring on June 4, 2024.” Pricing beyond that date hasn’t been revealed.