Adobe has just released a major new update for its Acrobat viewer and editor that adds ‘Acrobat Studio,’ a new platform that combines the PDF app with Adobe Express' creation features. It turns Acrobat into an AI-powered database and creation tool using your piles of PDF files.
The new Acrobat Studio comes with a feature called PDF Spaces, which are work environments that let you turn a collection of PDFs, websites, and other files into “conversational knowledge hubs”. This means you may upload up to 100 documents and consolidate all that information into a single workspace, where you can then interact with the content using AI Assistants.
These AI agents can help you get insights, answers, and even recommendations from your files. You can even assign specific roles to these AI assistants, like “instructor” or “analyst,” to help them synthesize information in a specific way. For example, a student could use it to organize their notes and research into study guides, and a businessperson could use it to highlight stats or information. Once you have a PDF Space set up, you can share the entire thing, including your personalized AI Assistant, with colleagues or classmates so they can collaborate too.
It sounds a lot like Google’s NotebookLM, which tends to be used for researching and finding out information about subjects. Unlike NotebookLM, the main goal here is to change Acrobat from a simple document-editing tool into a platform that can do a lot more than just give you the information from the sources you give it.
Acrobat Studio lets you create content like infographics, presentations, and flyers without needing to switch between apps. You get access to all of Adobe Express Premium’s tools and assets, including professionally designed templates and Adobe Firefly-powered tools like Text-to-Video and Text-to-Image. So you’re basically combining apps, which makes sense because the new pay tier for this app has all the features of the other Adobe Acrobat tiers.
All the trusted PDF tools from Acrobat Pro are still there. You can still edit documents, combine files, scan hard copies, e-sign agreements, and redact or protect your PDFs. The AI only analyzes documents that you ask it to use, and it even gives clickable citations that link directly to the source of the information within your documents.
The new app is built with the same security features that other apps under Adobe use, with encryption in a secure sandboxed environment. This kind of thing sounds local, so you don’t need to worry about Adobe storing your sensitive document information somewhere else.
