Adobe releases Acrobat AI assistant starting at $4.99 a month

Adobe on Monday released its artificial intelligence assistant, which helps users understand the contents of digital documents. Monthly subscriptions start at $4.99.

As part of the release, Adobe is also launching a free mobile version of the tool in beta that can respond to voice commands, and is bringing the service to extensions on Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

Adobe said subscription pricing for the feature is an “early access” rate and will change in the future.

First announced and launched in beta in February, Adobe’s AI assistant fields user questions about PDFs and other documents in Acrobat using a chatbot interface to locate specific information, generate summaries and provide citations drawn from the text.

Adobe said the tool can be used by taxpayers parsing through documents, consumers facing terms of service agreements and students compiling study guides from academic materials.

Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Adobe’s document product group, told CNBC the company is working on expanding the assistant’s ability to support users working off of multiple documents at once.

“A document approach is somewhat different because we’re not creating our own language models,” he said. “We’re still grounding in your content and giving you information out of that.”