Last week Adobe announced that it was bringing conversational AI to PDFs with its new AI assistant.
The conversational AI service will be integrated into Reader and Acrobat workflows to generate summaries, answer questions and format information for sharing in emails, reports and presentations.
Reader and Acrobat customers will have access to the full range of AI Assistant capabilities through a new add-on subscription plan when AI Assistant is out of beta.
Adobe’s AI assistant is apparently available as a preview to subscribers of its PDF readers, which begins at $13 a month and will be offered with an add-on price when it’s out of beta.
However Bloomberg’s Austin Carr, who carried out initial tests on the service, is unsure that it is advanced enough to justify an extra fee.
He points out that although Adobe’s assistant was able to synthesise text into requested themes, add up financial figures, and pluck contact information across some lengthy PDFs, the AI doesn’t yet work with scanned PDFs, cannot read images or penmanship, and takes a long time to digest longer texts.
Carr also noted that the AI system was not much of a conversationalist, as it surfaced auto-suggested prompts for various things it was able to locate within the text and not actually conversed back when asked how it was.
He also noted that ChatGPT Plus subscription is already able to perform similar tasks and more, such as opening a PDF which OpenAI’s flagship tool could summarise quickly.
Despite the fact that Adobe says it is exploring how to use AI in the PDF creation process, such as with writing structure, tone and layout automation, Carr says that “so far chatting with my PDFs feels about as dull as reading them myself”.
