- Adobe launches new AI tools for Acrobat users
- Features include PDF editing using natural language
- Turn digital documents into presentations and audio versions
There are some big changes coming to Adobe Acrobat today – and yes, there’s a lot of artificial intelligence involved here.
Acrobat has long topped my guide to the best PDF editors. It’s clean, intuitive to use and has a feature set that I would consider quite large.
But it looks like Adobe isn’t content to just leave it there. Already in recent months, we’ve seen the introduction of a premium business tier, Acrobat Studio, and PDF Spaces – an AI-powered workspace. Now the company has launched a number of new tools for the software.
What’s new in Acrobat?
There are four big changes for the digital document software in this latest update, based on Adobe’s three key pillars of faster AI insights, tailored sharing and content creation through Adobe Express.
Here’s what users can expect.
- New ways to edit PDFs using AI chat
- Generate Podcast allows you to turn PDF files into audio overviews
- Generate presentation turns documents into decks
- Improve collaboration via PDF Spaces
Let’s start with PDF editing – with the AI companion, you can now make changes to documents using natural language. Do you want to remove pages or rotate them? Paraphrase passages, generate summaries of entire documents? It’s all accessible through the AI chat box. If you’re not sure where to start, the system will also give you ideas for other changes or actions to take.
For me, Generate Podcast is the most interesting update. Don’t let the “podcast” name fool you. This is very similar to the read-aloud feature already found in Acrobat, where you can create an audio overview of documents, printouts and notes. Adobe also promises that the output can be tailored “to how you learn, so you retain more information.”
Generate Presentation is another AI tool (of course) and does exactly what you’d expect: it turns documents into decks for presenting information to colleagues. Powered by Adobe Express, which has received a lot of love over the last year, users can create decks based on over five hundred thousand templates and generate custom images to make them more eye-catching.
Finally, the company wants to improve collaboration within PDF Spaces. Not the most exciting update, but a welcome one with new options to invite collaborators to add files, write notes and make comments.
From the demo videos Adobe showed me, they all look useful for speeding up workflows and pretty easy to use — as I’d expect from an AI-infused Acrobat. But I’d be interested to see more results and learn how (or even if) professionals make use of these tools.
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