Adobe Acrobat has largely catered to professionals with its recent AI features. Now, the company is turning its attention to students by making the Acrobat more useful with the launch of a new AI tool called Acrobat Spaces. The tool will allow students to create presentations, flash cards, and quizzes from study materials such as PDFs, links, and notes.
With the launch, the creative suite company is trying to compete with other AI tools like Google’s NotebookLM, Goodnotes, and Turbo AI, all of which allow students to upload documents to generate different kinds of study materials. To gain traction, Adobe is making Adobe Acrobat Spaces free, and it’s hosting it on a separate URL. Plus, users can get started with Acrobat Spaces without logging in.
To use Spaces, students can upload all sorts of documents, including PDFs, Docs, PowerPoint, Excel, URLs, handwritten notes, and transcript files, and then generate different study materials, like flashcards, mind maps, quizzes, podcasts, and editable presentations powered by Adobe Express. They can also create study guides and maps to chart their way around a learning course.
The company previously added the ability to generate two-person AI podcasts from documents in Acrobat last month. That feature now extends to the student tool, allowing users to listen to the topics they are studying.
Students will also access the chat option to ask questions to the AI-powered assistant. Adobe said that the assistant grounds its knowledge in the uploaded documents to reduce the possibility of error. The company noted that it has developed the product by testing it with 500 students and various student groups from universities such as Harvard, Berkeley, and Brown.
Charlie Miller, VP of Education at Adobe, told TechCrunch over a call that while there are existing tools for study, Adobe wants to create a one-stop shop for students for reading and material creation.
“Students are already starting in Acrobat to consume these documents and to read all of their course materials. The thing that we’ve heard time and time again, they love this as a one-stop shop or a hub for study. When they’re already opening Acrobat to read those PDFs, they can just hit generate flashcards, or they can just generate a study space. Plus, not have to keep moving documents around, I think that’s one of the big differentiators,” he said.
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