Adobe Acrobat uses AI to turn your PDFs into podcasts

Adobe has added new generative AI features to Acrobat that aim to help you quickly edit PDFs and summarize them in audio and visual formats. These updates include chat-based editing and the ability to generate personalized podcasts and presentations based on your docs, which are now available in Acrobat Studio — the AI-infused document workspace app that’s distinct from Adobe’s basic PDF reader.

The new Generate Podcast feature provides a podcast-style audio summarization of whatever documents you feed it, including notes, meeting transcriptions, lengthy reports, and educational guides. While Adobe does have its own audio AI model, Generate Podcast currently leverages a Microsoft GPT model for transcription and a Google voice model. Adobe says this may change in the future as it continues to test technologies. Google’s NotebookLM research tool has a similar Audio Overviews feature, though Adobe Acrobat is likely more familiar to anyone who’s worked with PDF documents.

For a more visual summarization, Acrobat Studio users can ask the built-in AI assistant to generate a pitch deck that focuses on specific insights in source documents. The Generate Presentation feature taps into Adobe Express tools to provide a selection of presentation designs. You can select these to automate the entire process, or edit any part of the resulting presentation you’re not happy with.

Acrobat’s AI assistant now also supports editing PDF documents with chat prompts, following a similar update to Express last year. Acrobat Studio users can add signatures, remove pages, text, comments, and images, replace words and phrases, and more by describing the changes they want to make.