Adobe AI Assistant Acrobat Review: Can It Boost Your Tasks?

February 2024 marked the release of the Adobe AI Assistant in Acrobat and it instantly caught my attention. As someone who works with a lot of large documents daily, I’m always on the lookout for tools that can help simplify routine tasks: make it easier to find information, structure data, and highlight its most important parts.

When handling PDF files, I’m forced to spend a lot of time finding the desired passages or analyzing a multitude of pages to locate crucial information.

I’m writing this Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant review for other users like me who are interested in how artificial intelligence can help them with everyday tasks and learn if this new feature can deliver on its promises.

Akin to all other Adobe software, you can gain access to the AI Assistant in Adobe Acrobat by getting a subscription. Here are the options available to you if you want to leverage this innovative tool:

1. Acrobat Reader for free and AI Assistant as an add-on – you can acquire it for an extra $4.99/mo.
2. Acrobat Standard is $12.99/mo along with the AI Assistant will send you back an extra $4.99/mo.
3. Acrobat Pro is $19.99/mo and the AI Assistant add-on will cost you an extra $4.99/mo.

The single-click summary tool is the most impressive addition provided by the AI Assistant. As I constantly handle long reports and research documents, I regularly need to skim through hundreds of pages to find their most important parts. The provided summary feature lets me instantly break down a long document into a well-structured, bulleted list.

I first used this tool on a 30-page document in PDF format and received a summary within 15 seconds. I particularly enjoyed how clear and easily digestible the summary turned out to be, covering all essential points while still providing enough context for me to not feel lost. Such a level of convenience can save hours of your time, especially if you need to quickly process multiple documents.

If you want to learn how to use Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant as a chatbot, this is the feature for you, as it allows you to ask specific questions about your PDF files. For example, when I was putting together a contract, I inquired: “What is the termination clause?” and “Does this contract have a confidentiality agreement?” and the AI provided relevant information by quickly analyzing the document’s contents.

It should be highlighted though that this feature isn’t as robust when it needs to process complex technical or industry-specific terminology. In response to my question related to intellectual property legislation, the AI produced a generic answer that didn’t contain the information I needed, so keep this limitation in mind.

I greatly appreciated Adobe AI Assistant’s capability to clearly cite and reference sources for the generated information. This makes everything more transparent, which is relevant for situations when the AI gets data from external sources to respond to my inquiries.

That said, I feel like I rarely see the Acrobat PDF editor take advantage of its tool, as it usually only pops up when I’m asking general questions rather than file-specific ones.

The Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant has significantly streamlined the process of looking for specific information or subjects by just asking. When going through a long manual, I requested the AI to “find the troubleshooting passage” or “locate the section about setup”, which saved precious minutes of my time.

It’s also excellent at finding standard sections like “introduction,” “conclusion,” or “references” accurately, which makes my life even easier.

The proofreading and translation functionality included in Adobe’s AI Assistant has both strong and substantial weak points. Even though this artificial intelligence software provides basic editing features, it doesn’t have the functionality necessary for automatically finding and fixing grammatical errors, which can be a significant limitation for users who want to have perfect grammar in their texts.

I tested it by adding mistakes to my document on purpose, and the AI failed to recognize them, which speaks volumes about its efficiency.

Additionally, the lack of translation functionality restricts the usefulness of this tool for multilingual documents, which can be a serious issue for some users. However, it’s worth noting that Adobe has the potential to improve this feature, as the AI Assistant beta in Adobe Acrobat​ is still constantly being improved before its full release.

Being among the best PDF readers for Windows and Mac, the Adobe AI Assistant for Acrobat has several features that can streamline your workflow when handling large documents. It’s a great fit for users who often work with PDF files and need tools for quickly viewing them, finding specific information, and managing their content.

However, this tool isn’t perfect yet, as its limitations become especially apparent when handling documents with poor structure or complex terminology.