Adobe puts two AI tools into general release

Adobe brought more artificial intelligence power to the masses this week, putting the Adobe Express app and AI Assistant into general release. 

AI Assistant. Good news for people with too many documents and not enough time, this tool can give you the tl;dr at the click of a button. 

AI Assistant is a chatbot-like helper that analyzes documents — PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, etc. — and prompts users with recommended questions. It has a custom attribution engine that provides citations for all its answers. This helps ease concerns about AI hallucinations. If you don’t feel like asking questions, it can condense key points and format them for emails, presentations, blogs and reports.

Dig deeper: How to do an AI implementation for your marketing team

It was released to all Adobe users this week after being announced and launched in beta in February, with subscription plans starting at $4.99 a month. Don’t get too comfortable with that price, though. The current price is an “early access” rate that’s only available until June 5th.

The company also released a free, mobile version of AI Assistant in beta. This version can respond to voice commands. Adobe said the service will also soon be available via extensions on Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

Why we care. There’s no denying the convenience of this. If I could apply it to my email inbox it would be priceless. That said, the price point will be an important factor. The $5 a month dissuaded me from using it but the efficiencies provided at the enterprise level could make it a valuable add-on. Another issue: There’s an old saying that the devil is in the details. An AI summary will likely miss a lot of useful devils.

Adobe Express. The mobile app is a scaled-down version of the desktop Adobe Express, home to the company’s Firefly genAI tools. It was released in beta five weeks ago. 

With Express users can do photo editing, video editing, graphic design and AI work all in one place instead of using separate apps. It has a text-to-image generator and can further tweak the image if desired. It also has generative fill which lets you replace people or objects in photos. Video editing features include 4K video timelines and layer timing which lets users create real-time captions with generative AI. 

As we all know, AI isn’t cheap and Adobe Express’ full public release likely means some features will be locked behind a paywall. Pricing hasn’t been announced yet, but the desktop version of Adobe Express Premium tier costs $10 per month for individuals.