You Can Use Adobe AI to Analyze and Summarize Large Documents
We’ve seen how generative AI and its associated large language models (LLMs) can build websites , create art, and write text , but beyond the pros and cons of using these tools to create new content, there are other uses. something that doesn’t get as much attention: analyzing and summarizing large blocks of text.
This is a job that is tedious and time-consuming for humans, and that AI tends to do quite well (though we always caution against relying entirely on artificial intelligence when accuracy and clarity are important).
Of course, there is a time to do this and a time not to: you can’t get the richness and emotion of Bleak House from its AI summary. But if you need a near-instant summary of a long, detailed document, AI can help.
Adobe is the latest company to introduce similar AI capabilities, adding a beta version of AI Assistant to its Reader and Acrobat products. The idea is that you can literally talk to your PDFs to get valuable insight and insight from them, although you’ll need to sign up for one of the paid plans (starting at $22.99 per month).
If you want to test it out, there is a free trial and a 14-day money-back offer. Here are the features you should know about to help you decide if it’s worth it.
Communicate with PDFs in Acrobat
Upload the PDF into Adobe Acrobat (or Reader) on your desktop or online with an active paid subscription, and you’ll see an AI Assistant button in the top right corner. Right now, the tool can handle PDFs up to 120 pages long, and we tested it on the first chapter of the aforementioned Charles Dickens novel Bleak House .
Click AI Assistant to open the sidebar, and you’ll get a few suggested questions you might want to ask—you can either click on one of those suggestions, or enter your own query. We asked for a summary of what happens in this chapter and asked about the key characters mentioned, the setting, and the weather. In general, the answers were balanced and correct.
The overall summary was also very good: “The document deals with the dark and chaotic atmosphere of London in November, especially in the Court of Chancery, and the complex and never-ending legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.” Top marks for Adobe and its artificial intelligence.
However, as the program itself states, “AI-generated responses may be inaccurate or misleading,” so don’t rely entirely on them for your most important work. Although the AI did a pretty good job of identifying the characters in the chapter, it also included “Michael’s term”, which is clearly incorrect.
A very useful point is that many (though not all) answers contain source links, so you can see where in the document the AI assistant got the information. There are quick links to copy individual responses or an entire conversation to your clipboard, so you can easily get the AI’s responses elsewhere. Even in beta, AI Assistant seems like a really useful tool for anyone who spends a lot of time working with PDFs.
You can ask follow-up questions and ask questions about topics not covered in the document – we wanted to know who Charles Dickens was and the AI answered quite well. However, when it goes beyond the document, the assistant doesn’t give you citations, so you need to be even more careful about inaccuracies.
Communicate with PDFs in other tools
Adobe and its products will always be closely associated with PDFs and PDF management, but there are other options. We previously wrote about the aptly named ChatPDF , which is easy to use and also free (paid plans are available for larger PDFs): it’s based on the ChatGPT engine developed by OpenAI, and you just need to download the PDF to start asking questions about this.
ChatGPT itself can also handle PDFs, provided you pay for the $20 per month Plus package. In the web interface, click the paperclip icon to the left of the text entry field, then select the PDF file: you can then ask as many questions as you want about its contents, get answers, a summary, or whatever you need. You can tell ChatGPT to stick to what’s in the document or use other knowledge from other sources.
There’s also Perplexity , which scans, summarizes, and answers questions about PDFs for free (however, the paid Pro plan gives you access to a smarter model and more features). Simply point the AI to a PDF of your choice and it will suggest a list of questions you might want to ask, or you can ask your own.
Another option is to open the PDF in Microsoft Edge: If you then click the Copilot button (top right), you can use AI to query the document in any way you want, whether you need general summaries or need to highlight specific information . The only major AI that currently lacks this feature is Google Gemini , although it will likely not be long before it is added.