Latest news with #PDF
Hindustan Times
14 minutes ago
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Adobe's new Acrobat Studio places your PDFs and AI assistants in one place
Adobe is introducing a new platform that weaves together Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Express and artificial intelligence (AI) automation in a single window, the idea being to consolidate PDF documents, web pages and multiple tools into a hub. Adobe envisions Acrobat Studio, which also spawns its own subscription, as a collective that allows users to find value from creating specific workplaces where PDFs form the foundation of conversational knowledge hubs, with customisable AI Assistants to draw information, answers or recommendations alongside the company's Express creativity platform, PDF management tools, and the Firefly AI powered image and video generation options. Official image. Acrobat Studio will be priced at $24.99 per month (or ₹1,357 in India) for individuals and $29.99/month for teams (that's priced at ₹2,969 per license, in India). Adobe calls this as 'early access pricing', and it isn't clear for now if this will increase after this offer ends on October 31. This now sits alongside Acrobat Standard ($12.99 per month) and Acrobat Pro ($19.99 per month), and the exclusive functionality includes an Acrobat AI Assistant as well. Adobe says anyone who is currently subscribed to any of these plans, can upgrade. There are specific use-cases that may draw value from the Acrobat Studio subscription, with a proposition for students to piece together their notes into study guides and also able to quickly generate precise citations from their sources. Another possible use case could be relevant for travellers, who may be able to draw upon Acrobat Studio to collect location reviews, itineraries or recommendations and have AI Assistants help them plan the vacation. Or use Express tools to transform data into infographics or visual assets. 'Acrobat Studio is the place where your best work comes together, uniting the productivity of Acrobat, the creative power of Adobe Express and the value of AI to empower you to work smarter and faster. We're reinventing PDF for modern work, so whatever you need to get done, you can do that with Acrobat,' says Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president, Document Product Group at Adobe, in a briefing of which HT was a part. PDF Spaces will also allow users to also add specific websites and webpages to the collection of files and documents, for more information. Adobe says that users will have the flexibility to assign AI Assistants in PDF Spaces with specific roles, such as that of an instructor, or analyst, or entertainer, which will form the baseline personality for how they collate and present information, answer user questions and deploy reasoning to suggest further aspects worth exploring. Sharing should be easy too, the company promises, insisting entire PDF Spaces, including personalised AI Assistants, can be shared with colleagues, customers and classmates. At this time, Acrobat Studio is available only in English, worldwide. Adobe's Acrobat Studio and its focused proposition competes, in varying degrees, with Google's NotebookLM that can also behave as a virtual assistant capable of summarising, explaining, and answering questions based on uploaded documents (these can be PDFs, Docs, Slides, Microsoft 365 files, or web pages), and also includes a 'podcast-style' Audio Overview features. While Google unlocks NotebookLM with the entry spec AI Pro plan ₹1,950 per month), you'll need the top-tier AI Ultra plan ( ₹24,500 per month) to unlock higher usage limits. If the focus is on just writing and assistance with information, OpenAI's ChatGPT Canvas and Google Gemini Canvas also have areas of strength with wider document support and Google Docs sync respectively. It must be noted that the Canvas propositions from Google and OpenAI are more focused on coding tasks as well, something Adobe isn't promising.
Axios
4 hours ago
- Business
- Axios
Adobe taps AI to teach Acrobat new tricks
Adobe is adding generative AI to Acrobat, its venerable tool for creating and managing PDF files. Why it matters: Adobe and its rivals are racing to incorporate AI into their products before chatbots can render traditional software obsolete. Driving the news: Adobe on Tuesday launched Acrobat Studio, a subscription service that allows individuals or groups to query a series of documents, generating answers complete with citations. How it works: Customers can combine up to 100 documents into what Adobe calls "PDF Spaces." Acrobat Studio automatically organizes and summarizes the data, and users can ask questions or use the results to create presentations and other documents. The service focuses on the types of data found in PDFs, but Acrobat Studio also works with Word documents, PowerPoint, Excel and web pages. Available on desktop, web and mobile, Adobe Studio is priced at $29.95 per month for businesses and $25 per month for individuals. The subscription also includes the premium version of Adobe Express. The big picture: Adobe isn't the only software giant infusing AI throughout its product line. Salesforce kicked off a big agent push this year and Microsoft has added AI Copilot to nearly all of its key products. Zoom in: Adobe pitches itself as a creator-friendly alternative to other AI offerings. Its Firefly features are safe for commercial use because they're trained only on data that's either licensed by Adobe or in the public domain. Adobe also said it won't train its models on customer data. Our thought bubble: Adobe sent several documents related to the Acrobat Studio launch in a PDF Space. It's pretty nice to just ask questions of a press kit. I asked "How much does this cost?" and "Which document types are supported" and got the information almost immediately, rather than the usual process of hunting through various press releases, blog posts and spec sheets. It's something I probably could have done myself by importing the documents into ChatGPT or another app, but this was more convenient, and the included citations allowed me to easily double-check that there weren't any hallucinations. Yes, but: Some say Adobe still isn't moving fast enough. "Adobe is off to a slower AI start than we had anticipated," financial analyst Dan Ives said in a research note, removing the company from Wedbush's AI 30 list. Ives and colleagues say they have increased concerns that Adobe will see its products disrupted by AI, rather than benefiting from it. AI is getting rapidly better at creating software on demand that could eventually be far cheaper than off-the-shelf tools, while also being more personalized to an individual person or business. Between the lines: Although Adobe created the PDF format, it's now an openly available standard, and plenty of other services on the market allow people to query PDF and other document types. Adobe pitched Acrobat Studio as a more capable and secure option, especially for handling long documents and documents with charts, as well as those created by scanning a physical paper document, still a popular use of PDFs. "Even though other tools can do some of the capabilities, it's high risk," Adobe VP of product marketing Michi Alexander told Axios.
The Verge
4 hours ago
- Business
- The Verge
Adobe's AI Acrobat file hub is designed for more than PDFs
Adobe is introducing a new Acrobat platform that combines the PDF app with its Adobe Express content creation service and AI assistants that can automate specific productivity tasks. Acrobat Studio allows users to upload up to 100 documents and consolidate the information together into a single workspace. The idea is to evolve Acrobat beyond being a tool just for reading and editing PDFs, into a platform that supports a wider range of file types and productivity tools, including web pages and Microsoft 365 files. The platform enables users to work on multiple documents simultaneously without leaving Acrobat, using collaborative work environments called 'PDF Spaces' that pull file and website information into 'conversational knowledge hubs.' These PDF spaces allow users to view and sign agreements for a project, consolidate research and notes, and use built-in Express tools to turn data into infographics or visual assets that can be shared with colleagues and clients. Acrobat Studio also includes customizable AI agents in these PDF Spaces that build on previous AI features released for Adobe's standard Acrobat software. The AI assistants can be used by individuals and teams to offer insights, recommendations, and notes, and can generate ideas and citations from the collated data. Acrobat Studio is available globally in English starting today with unlimited access to PDF Spaces, AI Assistants, and Adobe Express Premium, and is offered as a separate subscription product that can replace Adobe's Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Pro plans. Early access pricing begins at $24.99 per month for individuals and $29.99 per month for teams for an annual contract. It's unclear what this pricing will increase to when the early-access offer expires on October 31st. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Jess Weatherbed Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Adobe Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Creators Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech
WIRED
4 hours ago
- Business
- WIRED
The AI-Powered PDF Marks the End of an Era
As Adobe rolls out more generative AI features for the PDF, the era of chatbot-less software is firmly a thing of the past. Illustration:When it was first released by Adobe in 1993, the PDF was truly transformative technology. The Portable Document Format was a multipurpose container that replicated the appearance and functionality of physical documents. That sounds unimportant, but as adoption spread with Adobe's introduction of free Acrobat software for reading PDFs a year later, anyone, from the government to your doctor's office, could rely on digital documentation that felt familiar to the paper versions. 'It wasn't like a text message, which is a native digital format or an email or a web page,' says Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor at the University of Maryland and author of Track Changes , a book about the history of word processing. 'The PDF was all about the cultural authority of print and documents that emerged out of human contexts, professions, motivations.' And now, over three decades after its initial release, Adobe is attempting to embed generative AI into the PDF as an essential aspect of the experience. The company started this AI makeover of the PDF last year by adding an assistant to its Acrobat software that answers user questions about a document's contents. Today, it's launching Adobe Acrobat Studio, which further leans into the software's AI-powered aspects and includes 'PDF spaces' where users can upload multiple documents and personalize how the chatbot assistant answers questions. 'We're reintroducing the brand,' says Michi Alexander, the vice president of product marketing at Adobe. 'We've been around for 32 years now, but this is the biggest inflection point for us since launch.' This release is about much more than just Adobe, though. The Adobe Acrobat Studio is a harbinger of generative AI further seeping into everyday, essential software, in a way that changes the experience for everyone. I currently can't open up a fresh Google Doc, click on the Instagram search bar, or adjust the Messages settings on my iPhone without being inundated with AI features. While some power users thoroughly enjoy the AI features, many signs point to a growing segment of users being exhausted by the glut of generative AI dominating current software releases. A report earlier this year from the Pew Research Center says US adults are far more concerned than excited about the effect AI will have on their lives and their jobs. Although Adobe is following industry trends with this latest release, the company previously iterated on the PDF in cutting-edge ways that defined itself among the leaders in technology trends. As an example of this, Duff Johnson, CEO of the PDF Association, a vendor-neutral group that's in charge of standardization and interoperability for this file format, points to the time when Adobe added transparency support to the PDF. 'The industry had to race a lot as soon as Adobe introduced this.' Around the same time, companies like Apple and Microsoft added more transparency features and support to their software. What sets this AI-focused release apart from other feature updates is the abstraction away from humans writing, editing, and parsing documents and towards the synthetic, and often unreliable, actions of generative AI tools. 'There is now AI in these very specifically human-centered document forms,' Kirschenbaum says. 'And to me, that's notable.' Much like the death of handwriting in the age of AI, users' relationships to documents is being fundamentally altered. 'We were the ones that created the PDF,' Alexander says. 'And we really see this as our opportunity to redefine what a PDF is.' Whether users look back in a few years on the release of Adobe Acrobat Studio and see it as an essential redefinition of the software, like transparency was, or just a passing fad that gets ignored among the myriad of other PDF features, the release marks an important moment in time. This is officially the year when AI ate software. The era when you could use an app without encountering multiple generative AI tools is definitively over. Let's see how long this new era lasts.
Forbes
4 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Adobe Unveils Brand-New Product: Acrobat Studio, To Transform Creativity
What are the essentials in your life? Your smartphone, the keys to your home, maybe (or maybe not) your wallet. But in your working life there's something that's been a mainstay for what seems like forever, I'd suggest: the PDF. It's about to change, thanks to Adobe Acrobat Studio. It's more than 30 years old, invented by Adobe in 1993, but it remains the staple for sharing information, for a start. It works across multiple platforms and is simple and reliable. But Adobe reckoned that as it's often the end product in a series of communications, there might be ways to make the PDF a more collaborative organism. Which is where Adobe Acrobat Studio comes in, linking Adobe Acrobat, which is what you need for regular PDFs, with Adobe Express and AI capabilities. Acrobat Studio is designed so that PDFs can be transformed, in something called PDF Spaces, to include multiple files, as well as selected websites and more, to create a more sophisticated and changing environment. It means that instead of a single document, you can access more in what Adobe calls 'conversational knowledge hubs,' so that you can work on multiple items and create reports or even infographics without leaving Acrobat Studio. Agentic AI is coming, as it is to so many products now, so that these assistants can sleuth out insights, generate ideas and more. The AI Assistants can tackle specific roles. For instance, you can ask it to be an instructor, an analyst or an entertainer. For the record, I will always choose entertainer. I mean, life's too short for anything else. The entire space can be shared to allow 'seamless collaboration by allowing recipients to interact with the same knowledge hub and extract insights effortlessly,' Adobe said. But with something as crucial to our working lives as the PDF, isn't there a risk that Adobe could spoil the simplicity and reliability with which we're all so familiar? I asked the company about this, and was reassured that you can still use PDFs just as you do now. The core feature of sharing a document or other file isn't going away. 'It's a simple means for people to exchange information and that should always remain. There is no reason to disrupt that. We just make it more powerful as we do with the system and all the document is the hero. There is an assistant available to you on the site for you to do more things with that. What this is doing is introducing an additional mechanism where people who do feel constrained because, say, they have so much information, and want to share it with their audience,'an Adobe spokesperson told me. In other words, it's about making conversations richer. What are the essentials in your life? Your smartphone, the keys to your home, maybe (or maybe not) your wallet. But in your working life there's something that's been a mainstay for what seems like forever, I'd suggest: the PDF. It's about to change, thanks to Adobe Acrobat Studio. It's more than 30 years old, invented by Adobe in 1993, but it remains the staple for sharing information, for a start. It works across multiple platforms and is simple and reliable. But Adobe reckoned that as it's often the end product in a series of communications, there might be ways to make the PDF a more collaborative organism. Which is where Adobe Acrobat Studio comes in, linking Adobe Acrobat, which is what you need for regular PDFs, with Adobe Express and AI capabilities. Acrobat Studio is designed so that PDFs can be transformed, in something called PDF Spaces, to include multiple files, as well as selected websites and more, to create a more sophisticated and changing environment. It means that instead of a single document, you can access more in what Adobe calls 'conversational knowledge hubs,' so that you can work on multiple items and create reports or even infographics without leaving Acrobat Studio. Agentic AI is coming, as it is to so many products now, so that these assistants can sleuth out insights, generate ideas and more. The AI Assistants can tackle specific roles. For instance, you can ask it to be an instructor, an analyst or an entertainer. For the record, I will always choose entertainer. I mean, life's too short for anything else. The entire space can be shared to allow 'seamless collaboration by allowing recipients to interact with the same knowledge hub and extract insights effortlessly,' Adobe said. But with something as crucial to our working lives as the PDF, isn't there a risk that Adobe could spoil the simplicity and reliability with which we're all so familiar? I asked the company about this, and was reassured that you can still use PDFs just as you do now. The core feature of sharing a document or other file isn't going away. 'It's a simple means for people to exchange information and that should always remain. There is no reason to disrupt that. We just make it more powerful as we do with the system and all the document is the hero. There is an assistant available to you on the site for you to do more things with that. What this is doing is introducing an additional mechanism where people who do feel constrained because, say, they have so much information, and want to share it with their audience,'an Adobe spokesperson told me. In other words, it's about making conversations richer. Suggested use cases included assistance in drafting responses to customer inquiries, analysis of customer feedback or help with drafting business reviews. Acrobat Studio is available globally from today. It's a subscription offering, with a 14-day free trial. It offers unlimited access to PDF Spaces, AI Assistants and Adobe Express Premium, with pricing starting at $24.99 a month.
